Narrator: The Battle of Winterfell,
which took place during
season eight, episode three, "The Long Night,"
was the most epic battle on "Game of Thrones" yet.
The production was, to say the least,
a brutal labor of love.
Here are just a few of the most amazing things about it
and how they were brought to life.
Warning: spoilers ahead.
Over the course of 11 weeks, a cast and crew of 750 people
worked in the worst imaginable weather conditions,
battling freezing temperatures
and all the elements, to make history.
Director Miguel Sapochnik, who has directed
some of the most legendary "Thrones" episodes to date,
took the helm here.
In order to keep off the undead army,
a giant moat was created around Winterfell.
The wights famously do not like fire,
so to keep them away, Melisandre lights it all on fire.
Yes, the fire you saw was real.
In order to achieve this effect,
they used about 900 steel logs.
They chose steel instead of wood
as they would appear to catch fire
without completely burning away.
To make the fire spread in the first place,
they filled water troughs
with gallons and gallons of propane.
The fire was important to add light to a battle
that was mostly shot in the dark of night,
a fact that has been controversial
for "Game of Thrones" fans
as it made it hard to know what was happening at times.
Cinematographer Fabian Wagner told Wired,
"The showrunners decided that
this had to be a dark episode,"
and, "Everything they wanted the audience to see is there."
A lot of dead bodies pile up in this episode,
and the crew used practical effects whenever they could.
Many of the wights that pop up in the crypt
were heavily inspired by the look of ancient mummies,
decaying skin and all.
The wights were mostly a combination of prosthetics and CGI.
Prop dead bodies, meanwhile, are not easy to handle.
They're expensive, heavy, and hard to move around.
The prop makers came up with a trick
following the Battle of the Bastards.
Instead of having to stick individual bodies up,
they would stack up a mound of dummies
and create a detailed mold of them.
The team created around 300 of these body piles.
This episode wasn't going to end
without the death of a fan favorite,
and "The Long Night" gave us the demise
of Lyanna Mormont, played by Bella Ramsey,
who sacrifices herself to kill off the giant wight.
Achieving this involved complicated and groundbreaking CGI.
They shot a piece of the scene on location
in order to get the backdrop.
While on set, a crew member
held a giant head on a tall pole.
While this was happening,
the camera operators were using Incam.
This technology allowed them to play back animation
of what the giant's performance would look like
that was then synced to the camera.
This allowed the camera operators to actually see the giant
at his proper scale while on set.
Then, against a green screen, actor Ian Whyte,
who is over 7 feet tall, actually played the giant.
He was filmed in a way
that made him seem like he was double his size.
Ramsey wasn't actually on set with him,
so for the shots where the giant picks her up,
he instead lifted up a green doll
covered in tracking markers.
That scene was then motion-captured.
In the final layer, for closeup shots,
Ramsey was lifted up by a giant robotic arm
that picked her up and moved her exactly as the giant would.
The giant wasn't even close to the biggest creature
involved in the battle.
There were the three dragons, Rhaegal, Drogon, and Viserion.
Famously, whenever you see shots of
Jon and Daenerys riding the dragons,
in reality, they're actually riding on
what looks like a big mechanical bull.
They also actually shoot fire on set.
The rest of what you see on screen
as well as the color of Viserion's flames
is largely a result of CGI.
Animating Viserion breathing fire
differed from the two alive dragons.
Part of that was because Viserion breathes blue fire,
but also, this dragon is injured. He's leaking,
as VFX supervisor Joe Bauer points out.
He has a hole in his neck, and he's missing half his face
by the time Jon Snow comes face-to-face with him.
You can see fire coming out of different parts of his face.
The damage caused by the dragon's fire
was added by production designers.
They walked around with flamethrowers
and covered rubble with dirt and mud.
"After 20 minutes of watching a battle, you're over it,"
Sapochnik said to Entertainment Weekly.
So how do you stop it from being a battle in that sense?
The biggest inspiration for this battle
was the Battle of Helm's Deep
from the "Lord of the Rings: The Two Towers,"
which Sapochnik notes is actually
three different intercut battles.
But that doesn't mean the action
wasn't incredibly important.
The star of the episode might've been Maisie Williams,
whose Arya Stark delivers the fatal blow
to the Night King that saves Winterfell.
It was a long road for Williams leading to this episode.
She said the director called her
a year before "The Long Night" started shooting
and told her to start training,
but she had no idea what exactly she was training for.
To prepare for some of the set's tight spaces,
weapons master Tommy Dunne
gave Arya a staff that would disassemble,
allowing her to fight in narrow spaces.
With the exception of some of the more dangerous moments,
Williams does most of her own stunts.
In fact, she's so committed to Arya
that the right-handed Williams
learned how to fight left-handed
just so she could fight the same way Arya did in the books.
When she took down the Night King,
she was attached to a wire and launched into him.
That sequence was mostly shot in front of a green screen
so the crew could have better control over the environment.