‘House of the Dragon’ Visual Effects Artists Reveal Drogon and Seasmoke Are Indeed Cut From the Same Cloth

Andria Moore

Andria is the Social and Engagement Editor for dot.LA. She previously covered internet trends and pop culture for BuzzFeed, and has written for Insider, The Washington Post and the Motion Picture Association. She obtained her bachelor's in journalism from Auburn University and an M.S. in digital audience strategy from Arizona State University. In her free time, Andria can be found roaming LA's incredible food scene or lounging at the beach.

Caraxes dragon
HBO Max

Last night, House of the Dragon took home the award for best TV drama at the Golden Globes. With a budget of around $20 million per episode, the widely popular HBO series was a huge accomplishment on the part of the cast, crew, and of course…the VFX team tasked with bringing the dragons to life.

To do so, requires modeling the dragons after already existing animals. For example, in episode two of the HBO series, the audience is first introduced to Daemon’s (Matt Smith) maroon dragon Caraxes. The beast appears on screen with piercing eyes and snake-like movements that immediately establish its cunning character.

HBO Max

According to Mike Bell, visual effects supervisor at Moving Picture Company (MPC) Caraxes was largely based on the awkwardness of “a greyhound [dog] laying down or sitting.”

The thinking there, according to Bell, was that Caraxes isn’t meant to be lying down. “Caraxes is supposed to be flying,” said Bell. “Which is why he has that kind of almost snake-like animation.”

But for visual effects artists, the process of taking the dragon from conception to the screen is easier said than done. Unlike its predecessor which only had three, House of the Dragon had 10 dragons shown on screen just in Season 1. The construction of each alone can take three to four months, according to lead VFX Supervisor Angus Bickerton.

“For the first couple of months, we were just designing the dragons basically,” he said. “So we were collating lots of real world references, and Miguel [Sapochnik] and Ryan [Condal] were very keen to follow George R.R. Martin's belief that the dragons should all be quite distinctive, and more colorful than they were before, and have quite definitive characters.”

One of the most complicated sequences for the VFX team was also one of the most visually stunning for viewers: Vhagar and Arrax’s fight scene at the end of the season finale. Bickerton said before any production or filming takes place, the team spends a few days on set just scoping out and marking the scene.

HBO Max

“We had to kind of work out the flight path,” Bickerton explained. “We knew that they were arriving and leaving Storms End. And we found a location in Iceland…so we used that as our design, and then we plotted out what the chase would be.”

The VFX team then used virtual production software, Cyclops, created by visualization studio Third Floor, to map out a rough draft of what the scene would look like. Cyclops uses augmented reality and game engine tech to overlay CGI assets over live video in real time. Basically, Cyclops displays a quick rendering of what a dragon or building would look like in a scene, so the cast and crew know their marks and can visualize the layout.

“That allows [Director] Greg [Yaitanes] and his DOP, Pepe Avila del Pino, to come in and use the iPad to explore and find shots rather than, you know, an animator sitting at a desk.”

Lux Machina, a visual technology studio headquartered in Los Angeles, worked to stage many of the sequences on set before and during filming.

“[Engine operators] are doing a lot of things like recording and capturing the data that we're shooting on set,” explained Julia Lou, engine technical director and virtual production supervisor for Lux Machina. “So recording things like where the camera was, and any lens metadata, and taking snapshots of what the settings were and stuff like that.”

After staging is complete, Lou works in real time with the VFX team to operate the visual effect assets that take place in real time during filming.

Once the scenes are staged and mapped out, on-set visual effects supervisor Ed Hawkins is responsible for ensuring that filming aligns with the VFX team’s request. Lighting cues and camera angles have to be “pretty meticulously planned out,” according to Hawkins, so that it matches what the VFX team will create in post-production. And two dragons with two riders for a fight scene like the finale means two separate shoots.

“That was one of the more complicated sequences,” Hawkins said. To create it, all the actions of the dragons and the camera movements were pre-planned using a revolutionary form of VFX technology that offers a major upgrade to the traditional green screen. Rather than placing the actors in front of a green screen and building out the special effects in post-production, the team uses huge LED panels that surround a physical set that display whatever background image is required. The “volume,” as the technology is referred to, can also respond to camera movements.

“Also in that particular setup (the finale), it was quite challenging because we had a lot of rain and wind and smoke, which you wouldn't normally put into a volume, because it's a big, expensive computer screen,” Hawkins explained.

That said, even with all this state of the art technology, creating 10 dragons with distinct features and unique personalities is no easy task. In fact, Bickerton confesses that the team did reuse one dragon from the old series: Drogon, Queen Daenerys’s most famous dragon in Game of Thrones.

“When I joined, I was handed an old fashioned, big hard drive with about eight terabytes of accumulated assets and data from ‘Game of Thrones,’” says Bickerton. “We tried to glean as much as we could from those assets. And one of the key assets, of course, was Drogon himself.”

One thing Bell said he’d like to work on if he comes back for Season 2, is continuing to build the dragons in more detail and hone in more on their personalities and corresponding movements.

“I'd like to see how Caraxes’s character develops because he’s such an incredibly unique dragon, different from everyone else,” he said.

With the rapid improvement in VFX technology, it’s possible fans will see even more of the dragons in future seasons. Having worked as the lead on the first and last two Harry Potter movies, Hawkins said those films are an excellent example of the evolution of visual effect technology.

“If you look at those sequences of films, you can almost see the whole arc of the way the industry has changed,” Hawkins explained. “Because, you know, the first film was shot on film, there was a lot of models and practical effects. But as it went through the sequence of builds, Hogwarts became a digital asset. It's literally the whole arc of going from the beginnings of digital effects to where we are now.”

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LA Venture: Dangerous Ventures’ Gaby Darbyshire On ‘Shining a Bright Light’ on Difficult Problems

Minnie Ingersoll
Minnie Ingersoll is a partner at TenOneTen and host of the LA Venture podcast. Prior to TenOneTen, Minnie was the COO and co-founder of $100M+ Shift.com, an online marketplace for used cars. Minnie started her career as an early product manager at Google. Minnie studied Computer Science at Stanford and has an MBA from HBS. She recently moved back to L.A. after 20+ years in the Bay Area and is excited to be a part of the growing tech ecosystem of Southern California. In her space time, Minnie surfs baby waves and raises baby people.
​Gaby Darbyshire
Gaby Darbyshire

On this episode of the LA Venture podcast, Dangerous Ventures founder and General Partner Gaby Darbyshire explains how her background as the co-founder of a pioneering digital publisher set the stage for her interest in climate technology.

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This Emergency Alert Nonprofit Saw Over 75,000 Incident Reports During the SoCal Storm

Samson Amore

Samson Amore is a reporter for dot.LA. He holds a degree in journalism from Emerson College and previously covered technology and entertainment for TheWrap and reported on the SoCal startup scene for the Los Angeles Business Journal. Send tips or pitches to samsonamore@dot.la and find him on Twitter @Samsonamore.

This Emergency Alert Nonprofit Saw Over 75,000 Incident Reports During the SoCal Storm
Evan Xie

The ruthless storm that’s pitched Southern California into a torrential downpour this week is also putting Los Angeles’ emergency alert systems to the test.

While the National Weather Service for Los Angeles’ flash flood warning isn’t currently in effect, at least two more storm systems are expected to touch down later this week.

And the more it rains, the more evident it becomes that Los Angeles lacks a cohesive central alert system for the City of LA that can warn residents in real time if they need to evacuate or relocate.

Enter the Los Angeles Incident Tracker, a nonprofit that launched this June with the goal of sending residents real-time alerts about weather-related incidents at their address. Doing business as LAIT911, the desktop and mobile app is a free service that collects data from several raw 911 feeds, including LA Fire, the LA County Fire Department and California Highway Patrol to provide a digital fire blotter.

This past week, the demand for information during the storm skyrocketed, with over 75,000 incident reports viewed by nearly 10,000 people since the storm began less than a week ago, according to LAIT911 operations director and founder Jonathan Martin. Martin said 50% of its user registration in the past week came from Jan. 9 alone, when the LA Department of Public Works’ headquarters Downtown recorded nearly six inches of rainfall.

The incidents are automatically added to LAIT911’s app dashboard. Once data is received the individual incidents are verified (usually by at least 2-3 freelance volunteers who are online at any given time monitoring local alerts). LAIT911 copies live dispatch information, and all following real-time alerts, into its app, and adds relevant safety information from both its own databases and third parties. The app also rates how severe each incident is to determine whether or not to send out alerts.

And though there’s no shortage of apps designed to track earthquakes, or wildfires, there’s only a handful of disparate systems that residents can use for emergency weather alerts.

“The [current citywide] alerting system right now is antiquated [so] there's not much public insight into what's going on in the city,” said Martin. “Sometimes there's no rhyme or reason why one incident will get an alert and one won't, and unless you're actively monitoring it, you really won't notice if it's relevant for you.” Which is why Martin wants to focus a bit more on the geo-targeted alerts rather than the kind sent out by the city that affects everyone.

That said, Martin is working on a partnership with the County Assessor’s Office to integrate some of their data to show users not just where a building incident occurred, but what kind of structure it is. In addition, Martin is trying to partner with the City’s Emergency Management Department, which puts out alerts for only major disasters.

One of those people was dot.LA senior editor Drew Grant, who said she found the “moment by moment updates” helpful after discovering the app this week, and noted that the LAIT911 interface was easier to make sense of than intel from a typical police scanner.

Right now the web app, which is into Google Maps’ API, is free to use on computers. Martin said he’s working on developing its own map feature that it can improve on as needed.

It’s easy to set up too. You just plug in your mobile phone number and address and LAIT911 will send alerts in your area straight to your device.

For people who want extra capabilities there is a subscription option in addition to the free web app. Pricing for the subscription ranges from $10-$17 per month, and it gives users access to LAIT911’s mobile app, advanced incident searching and instant notifications via Slack.

The free version of LAIT911 is, however, more than comprehensive. 90% of the information comes from raw 911 dispatch feeds, while about 10% is provided by a team of 10 volunteer incident reporting analysts, who review the calls and verify their legitimacy.

In case of power outages, there is also a backup. Martin said LAIT911 uses a data center run by Amazon Web Services in Northern California, which has so far been “incredibly resilient.” But, if that center were to go dark, it would take “maybe 30 minutes max” to transfer to another data center and get back online, he said.

“The real reason I made LAIT911 was just for my own nerdiness to analyze the data and how fires work and try to predict wildfires,” Martin added. Besides extreme weather, one of LAIT911’s focuses is on safety incidents surrounding the LA Metro.

So who are LAIT911’s competitors? Martin considers emergency alert app Citizen his primary rival. But he said, “I can confidently say that we don’t have any competitors that have the same amount of data.”

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