How ‘House of the Dragon’ Turns Fiery Fantasy Into TV Reality

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How ‘House of the Dragon’ Turns Fiery Fantasy Into TV Reality

At the risk of mixing medieval metaphors, dragons are a double-edged sword.

For Ryan Condal, the co-creator and showrunner of HBO’s “House of the Dragon,” the creatures are key to the show’s magic, literally and figuratively.

“They are the one fantasy element that we’ve allowed ourselves,” he said. “In our world, in this *******, the magic is these dragons.”

But they are also ****** incarnate. “It’s all metaphor, all allegory for nuclear conflict,” Condal said. “You take the city with an army if you want it to be standing afterward. You can’t do anything surgical with a dragon.”

The ongoing second season of the “Game of Thrones” prequel has included more of these beautiful, terrible beasts than any other in the franchise, including spectacular air battles in the fourth episode, “The Red Dragon and the Gold.” Sunday’s installment, “The Red Sowing,” in which aspiring dragon riders claim new mounts — or **** trying — was more grounded, but it presented the most complicated challenge yet.

In interviews last week, Condal, the visual effects supervisor Dadi Einarsson and some of the actors charged with piloting the creatures onscreen explained how they brought it all to life.

The test case

“In a big way, Season 1 was proof of concept for the series to come,” Condal said. “We designed Season 1 to tell this hopefully compelling Shakespearean family drama that would build to this final act where we would see the first dragon ******.”

In the resulting skirmish in the Season 1 finale, the young Prince Lucerys Velaryon and his small dragon, Arrax, are ******* by Vhagar, the enormous, centuries-old ****** ridden by the one-eyed warrior Prince Aemond Targaryen.

“Vhagar fighting Arrax is like a rhino versus a house cat,” Condal said. “But it had the elements: It was a chase, it had two dragons, you had two actors riding on saddles and everything else was digital. It was an entirely virtual sequence, essentially.

“If we could pull that off and get the audience with it,” he continued, “we could take the intervening year and a half [before Season 2] to do the R&D to figure out how to escalate.”

Get to know your dragons

Each dragon has its own distinct look, size, sounds, coloration and personality. Condal and others work with conceptual designers to nail down the look of each one. “Weeks and weeks of iterations on that,” he said.

The production had stat sheets for the different dragons, Einarsson said, with details like size, strength, ******, demeanor and their first rider, in the prehistory of the show. “All of those things are important for us to be able to sculpt a multidimensional character, something that’s not just a trope or a creature,” he said.

When the designs are finished, they go to visual effects companies like Weta FX and Rodeo FX to be fleshed out into the fully articulated three-dimensional creatures viewers see onscreen.

“One of the main goals for the season was to treat the dragons as characters, not just as beasts or modes of transportation,” Einarsson said.

Key dragons have had much more to do in Season 2, and in more vivid detail. These include Vhagar and the two beasts he vanquished in Episode 4 during the Battle of Rook’s Rest: Meleys, ******* with its rider, Princess Rhaenys; and King Aegon’s Sunfyre, grievously wounded but whose fate ******** unknown. In the sixth episode, “Smallfolk,” Seasmoke, abandoned by Laenor Velaryon in Season 1, chose its own new rider: Addam of Hull, a humble shipbuilder who is secretly related to Laenor.

“Dragons are very intelligent creatures,” said Clinton Liberty, who plays Addam. “Seasmoke can sense who the human is behind the facade of who the human’s trying to portray.”

In Sunday’s episode, two dragons who have been little-seen and riderless so far in the show take center stage: Silverwing and Vermithor.

“Silverwing was the stately old dragon of the good Queen Alysanne,” Condal said. “I described her as the Britannia, the ship that Queen Elizabeth did her progresses on. She certainly did not do any fighting. She was the Concorde.”

In Sunday’s episode, Queen Rhaenyra, played by Emma D’Arcy, recruits commoners of noble blood — the illegitimate children of Targaryen royals, known as dragonseeds — to see if these dragons will accept them as riders, in order to expand her army. Most **** in fiery agony, but an unassuming barfly named Ulf claims Silverwing.

“I worked out quite quickly that Silverwing is one of the kinder dragons and, I believe, the most beautiful,” said Tom Bennett, who plays Ulf. His performance is different as a result: “It’s the first time you ever get to see someone flying a dragon laughing.”

Vermithor was something else, said Kieran Bew, who plays a commanding blacksmith named Hugh. The significance of the character, who has been seen throughout the season, is revealed when he claims the ill-tempered dragon.

“We talked about how Vermithor is the Bronze Fury — an ****** dragon,” he said. “From a performance perspective, knowing that leads to the choices Hugh makes during the claiming. You’ve got to make yourself big, man.”

Filming the fantasy

No one has ever seen actual dragons, and there is little precedent for large-scale, realistic dragon action in earlier films and TV series. So “House of the Dragon” has few obvious models to draw from.

For the Battle of Rook’s Rest, which featured extensive dragon-on-dragon conflict in broad daylight, the team looked to the skies for inspiration. The camera angles for the dogfights were inspired by World War II movies. The spiraling clash between Meleys and Vhagar was based on the behavior of birds of prey.

“There’s this mating-fighting ritual that eagles do, where they lock talons and spin, separating before they ******,” explained Einarsson, who said the episode director, Alan Taylor, came up with the idea. As with most effects-heavy filming, the producers used extensive visual plans to help all involved understand what they were doing in the dragon scenes. “Storyboards first,” Condal said. (Einarsson credited the storyboard artist Jane Wu with the aerial combat’s fluid feeling.) Then rough animated versions of the sequences, called previsualizations, are created. This helps the actors as well as the effects team and directors.

“We can show them a previs of the shot: ‘This is what’s happening, and this is the creature that’s coming in,’” Einarsson said. “They can really start to imagine what it is.”

For flight scenes, the actors sit on moving rigs that are like enormous mechanical bulls with cameras on them. The perspective of most shots is either “dragon-mounted” — on the same dragon as the rider — or “dragon-to-dragon” — on an imaginary dragon a short distance away.

Then there were the shots that fell into neither category, like the one of Meleys and Vhagar’s intertwined plunge. “Rules are meant to be broken,” Einarsson said.

Earthbound action

At the center of Dragonstone, House Targaryen’s ancestral home, looms the Dragonmont, a volcanic peak full of tunnels and caverns where the island’s riderless dragons dwell. This is where Rhaenyra’s “army of bastards” meets its fiery fate.

For all of its complications, filming dragons in the air is easier than filming them on the ground. Unlike in the fully digital environment of the sky scenes, physical sets allow actors and camera operators to improvise in the moment. “You want to be able to react to performances,” Einarsson said. Logistical challenges mount accordingly.

On set, a dragon is represented by “two puppeteers that have a long broom handle with a big, lightweight dragon head on the front of it,” Einarsson said. “That’s for eye-line and any kind of touch interaction — the more intimate things.” Condal said it took months of planning with the episode director, Loni Peristere, and others to create an enormous new cavern set to depict the gigantic, ferocious Vermithor laying waste to dozens of would-be dragon-riders. “That’s how you make this thing big and believable,” Condal said.

“A sequence like this, it becomes an episode in and of itself, one that requires its own production meetings and budget and schedule,” he said.

Bew, whose character, Hugh, ultimately claims Vermithor, said the sequence was both stunning in its complexity and relatively simple for him to perform.

“We’re choreographing it like it’s a Cirque du Soleil dance,” he said. “Cameras on wires, people moving in the background, stunt guys, people operating the dragon. Rowley [Irlam, the stunt coordinator] is setting ***** to people. But technology has moved on so much that they just edited it together as we went, and the effects guys have an iPad they can hold up against me, showing me where Vermithor’s going to be. It’s surprisingly easy.”

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