I
Remember looking at the loot train attack
I said this is bigger than Bob
And David and dance that has to be bigger than Bob said it's bigger than Bob
Doesn't got a bit of that western feel but then he heard her I cans in on top of that and it makes an incredibly
complicated one to shoot like a time travel movie where what if somebody had an
F-16 that they brought to a medieval battle day you have daenerys targaryen unleashed for the first time in Westeros
And she is going to show them what she could do with every time if something goes wrong
More targaryen comes out more fire comes out so she starts to take matters into her own hands
You have a big battle sequence
Especially one where you have multiple points of view you have to figure out
How you balance those and what is this sort of Chief point of view?
That you want to lean on and I chose to focus on Gainey that it was about being on the other side
But dragon attack trying to hold together his troops in the middle of watching the world change forever
It's just complete annihilation and like he sees the horror of so many men just burned to ashes
There's nothing you can do which is scary
She keeps losing battles and being weakened without ever striking back
And there's only so much of that dany can take only so much that anyone would be able to take
We're now left with our heroes and our heroes are on opposite ends of this chessboard
Tyrion has the most complex
Set of emotions about this battle of anyone because he's got the woman he serves in one end, and he's got his brother
Who he loves on the other end and it's a real struggle for him
Every piece of his being is wishing he can interesting it, but he can't and I'm seeing firsthand my family lose
she's the aggressor and
Jaime and bronn through their Pov. We see that it ain't pretty conquering and
The hope is that the audience doesn't know who to root for that'd be fun
Something like the loot train involves a lot of different stunts all working at sort of the very extremes of their abilities
I think this was a difficult challenge because there are so many different looks and phases of the battle that come into play
There's a lot of continuity to make sure that we're in the right space in the right part of the process
Reflecting the right amount of burn and then you do it in between the cracks of everybody else doing their job
Because the entire sequence is a wagon train
involved 27 wagons and their various
It's a dressing we have such a reshuffle the entire set constantly which means dressing 180 degrees or 360 depending on the camera Movement
So it means we're to be very
Particular when it comes to dressing our burnt elements or unburned elements are partial burnt elements. There are so many
stages to consider
But it's definitely held a lot more fun when it gets into the bloody battle we have a die that
We're using which is an Eco
friendly dice
Dice things black to make it look very charred and burnt and we're using
Several forms of ash as well to dress in and make it all look authentic a little charcoal and stuff like that
Maybe when you're watching it
It doesn't necessarily stand out
And that means we've done our job because people just accept this is the world and that's the environment
We are the front line of defense and detail is our job. So we're very happy about it
When I get to a sequence like the one we're doing right now I
Take a deep breath and go oh boy that is going to be a lot of work
We had every toy you could possibly imagine in the making of it with four cameras most of the time
Sometimes we had up to seven or eight cameras we've gone through three different tracking vehicles for different
Purposes on this we've got a basically a souped up pickup truck with really good suspension for our
Charges Dothraki charges, and what-have-you, we've got a another electric vehicle called a shadow tracker
And we've got a jib arm on that
and then finally we've got basically a souped up dune buggy with a stabilized head on it that takes all the bounce out and
A nice steady smooth shot to use over the particularly rough terrain
We needed to sell speed and we needed to shoot
Elaborate Dragon points of view to do Those kinds of shots
We're relying on two different camera platform one is what's called Spider cam?
this is basically a
camera Rig to a cable run between two construction cranes and they can move their camera very quickly from one end to the other and
Camera can go about 70 miles per hour we also used a company called fly cam. Which is like a souped-up drone
It's like a small helicopter
They were also able to go very fast and have a much more solid image to be able to work with and you would get
from a traditional throne so we can fly over them safely and
also
have
Interactive effect on the ground and capture all those elements that will have a dragon either in front of the lens or above the lens
The battle is going to rely very heavily on visual effects at the end of the day
There's a lot of different beats to the attack
Sort of Like Cowboys and Indians and
Fire-breathing dragons all rolled up into one there's drogon wreathing lots of fire setting lots of things and people on fire
To give an idea in season six which was our biggest season up to that point
We have 11 shots that featured amelia riding the dragon in the Loo train we have over 80
It's very new ground that we're trying to figure out this dragon
Who's in 100 feet up in the air who breathe fire of a column of 30 feet wide that you're like, okay?
How the hell are you going to do that you've got amelia on the back of a motion base. That's
animated to fly in concert with the
Animation on the Dragon so that the thing she's moving on is moving around as if she was really writing on Drogon
But in a stage in belfast in front of green screen so being on this theme Park Road
It's kind of what it is
And you're strapped in then looking like you are controlling it when there's so much going on
you just got upon it every single bit of imagination you have and
Just use it. I mean you even imagine being on the back of a reptile with breathing fire at your command
Stop cubes
One of the most complicated shots was this strafe run where the cameras over the back of Danny as she is
blasting the shit out of this line of lannisters
And we train carriages we had to have spider cam fly
camera in real time and in perfect sync with 100 feet of ground explosions that are huge
Sam is our Fx guru and he's kind of a Madman in the best possible way
And you know one of his responsibilities is setting things on fire
Which is really good at the strafe run was?
150 feet Long and
Had a 15 rows of charges we tested it in Madrid back in
august we only tested a short section of it - the
Carts because we were still making those all the effect had to mimic as though the flame is coming from the sky
So we'll always size up the flame later and post will shoot elements of flame against black
But Sam here has to make it feel that the impact of the flame is
Pushing along, so it has a travel to it
I mean we've been blowing things up for many days, but working at the timing of that
was quite a process than the end of the world with a fuel mix and an explosives Civil most like a
machine gun Sort of Straight
but closer together and as each
unexploded
Then engulf the next and next or next so you look at a seamless line of flow and aspiring for it because there's only one
Side, there's a lot that could go wrong
There's a lot of materials used and a lot of little pyro used as well, so it's the excitement of when that button is pressed
It's the euphoria you feel after knowing the hard work. That's involved it all comes to that point. That's the prize. That's the excitement
That's the reason
George Martin's often said that the dothraki are kind of an amalgam of American Indian tribes and the mongols
Both peoples who are you know phenomenal on horseback and they were just much faster
And so unorthodox in their battle approach that they could literally ride circles around their enemies I?
Think there was a line in the outline that said and it now it's down to Camila to do her trick that thanks
GnD okay, we're we're going to go now. Let's think of some ideas
What can we bring which has never been seen on screen before she said you know what about?
The Dothraki are coming down if they all just stood up on their horses and started shooting
Arrows at them, and I thought that sounds great, but that's not possible pretty good though
It is we build these special stirrups
and we can do it so I send a team out here with the horses and they said they started rehearsed in the action and
Shooting a previous which was then sent back to Northern Ireland, and then we could start good in that in front of people
You've got almost a metal shoe even your foot into and then you have ones on the side of the horse and the other on
The top of the saddle so we have these guys standing up
And you know we're endeavoring to try and you know create something that not somebody haven't seen before and it's extraordinary
It's like a wave rising up from a steel ocean and all these guys perfectly coordinated rising out in it
Love it
And it shows us that the dothraki are horse masters because you really haven't had that opportunity before you know so much of these
Battle themes now has become visual effects that I hope people realize that much of this is actually being done
It's really you know stuntmen standing up on horses
With bow and arrow shooting arrows and the compressive thing to do there is something about a guy on a horse
Standing on a horse charging there's something pretty impressive we go that
Don't just do that, and we were kind of thinking to do something mathematically. We know when they come in
It's crazy that they're coming into pre-shaped. You don't know where they're coming from and they're just absolutely
Mad men on horses, and that's what we tried to recreate on screens out of your training sequence
This battle was the most fire intensive one. We've had we burned
More stuntmen and has ever been burned and anything shot and in a single sequence the dragons have groans
You know the size of A 747?
Now so you think then that the amount of people that burn in one go would increase we have potentially the most birds
Full bones ever done on TV. History which is running 20 mode one shot
Which we have coming up, and it was there was a few raised their eyebrows when I suggested 20
and it wasn't just because it's a record as the supporter is it was because we just needed to see the scope of what was
happening
So that was quite a challenge
The difficulty with 20 people is just that you ramped up the safety aspect on it because there's more people in harm's way
There's more that can go wrong
That was quite nerve-racking for many reasons obviously when you have that amount people collected
And they're all on the fire you get a lot of heat gathering in the centre
So I was really concerned about you guys in the middle
And I wanted to make sure
We get the guys on the outsides as far away from the guys on the inside as quickly as possible
We're using Kmart poppers this basically like a camping cylinder and we put it inside a metal cage
So that the shrapnel won't hurt anybody and we basically four pyro Charge on that which explodes the gas proper
Create a 15 feet fireball
and we put one of those these performer and just means that when you light them they really liked during this whole process where you're
On fire you do have to hold your breath, and that's that's like the key point to keep your heart rate down
So you can hold your breath throughout the whole thing Riley's big on making it as calm as possible
You know if someone's on fire you know, it's quite a high adrenaline thing going on and saving your breath is very important
So you've got to be calm
You know we are a show that doesn't see on our laurels
So we do try and top ourselves each year although
we seem to make it more difficult for ourselves as we go up just to the fear factors of course that we see a
Man on fire of never mind Twenty twenty guys and one goes, it's pretty
scary
You know when we start making these huge battles it's so hard to imagine that where we're going to finish because there's so many moving
pieces, but it's ultimately just you know one shot at a time and then figuring it out from there the cameras and
Actors and stunts, and it was very much an all-hands-on-deck
Sequence as much as we've ever had and everybody did an excellent job of fitting all the puzzle pieces together?
This is big cinema and to get to work in all those Genres all rolled into one
Fantastic world, that's the part I like you never know what they're going to throw at you
You know last year we completely battle of the busters, and it was like. Oh yeah, how about this year?
It's good there was at the end being I love that it naturally gets bigger. This shows you just does this not
It's not me doing it, but they write it
It's a unique challenge in that you'll never really be able to do that kind of thing again
And you know the next time I get to work on some other show. It'll be so boring. You know where's the cable cam
Where's the five cameras and the 20 burning guide?
you