Thursday, September 12, 2013
How FX Wizards Turned Tennis Balls Into Dragons for Game of Thrones
gizmodo.com: Sure, we're not talking practical effects like with the chestburster or T-600, but the magic behind the Game of Thrones dragons is just as impressive, except with computers.
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8 comments:
That's really cool. I was wondering how they were planning to do this, as I have read the books and watched season one. Baby dragons in one scene are a lot easier to do than big interactive dragons. Creating the dragons requires a lot of drawing and planning before even thinking about making them move. I liked how they took real world things to use as research for the way that the dragons would move. Crossing a bat and an eagle was great.
It was a good idea to make the actors interact with a tennis ball so that the animators could put the dragons right there in Dany's hand. I can only imagine what they will have to use when the dragons get even bigger because their heads won't be vaguely tennis ball sized anymore and when people start riding them!
Still want a dragon! I know ever since I was about 8 years old I wanted to have a pet dragon. To tell the truth it first I want a pet Godzilla, and I will admit that I was a fan of the American Godzilla. This was mostly because being a fan of Jurassic Park and the T-Rex translated into American Godzilla would more represented the modern T-Rex then the old slow moving T-Red or Godzilla. More forward, amazing the amount of engineering that went into making a more realistic creature. Just the detail work is impressive. There is still curiosity about how long does this take. Is the time coming down and becoming more and more practical or are we still talking about…. No idea and No concept of time for anything like this. Looks Cool! I want a dragon!!
I find this technology fascinating. This is the kind of detail in animation that one would expect to see in a full length feature film, not an episodic television show. I have never seen the episodes of Game of Thrones in which the dragons have been characters, but juding from this video, the quality of the CG involved is really high. This must take a lot of time. I wonder how long the episodes need to be in post production before they are ready to be premiered. Would this affect their filming schedule? I would be curious to know if they need to start filming the episode earlier than a typical hour-long episodic television show, or if their filming time is condensed in order to give more time to post-production.
Jess raises some interesting points here. Television has transformed even in the last few years. The introduction of such high quality CGI, especially when used for characters which are featured so regularly, means a different scale and kind of work is going into television shows. I think that these dragons, and the Netflix Premiere of Arrested Development point to major changes in how we can expect to see television shows. Releasing every episode together also offers some possible solutions to the timeline questions Jess pointed out.
I found it really interesting with how much detail they put into the adolescent aspect of the dragons. It probably would have been a lot easier for the CG team to make everything very smooth like an experienced flyer might be. Instead they took on the challenge of making the flight look awkward as if the dragons were still figuring out exactly how it worked. It was also really fascinating that they used simulated wind tunnels to make the flight as real as possible. It seems like they designed a 3D model that if it were an actual animal would actually be capable of flight. I would also be curious to know how long episodes are in post-production for since that CG process seems pretty time intensive.
This is very interesting. I've always wondered how actors interact on location with characters that haven't been created yet. As a kid I would imagine some poor intern in the epths of an animation studio tracing the actor's hand and matching the movement of the animals' head interacting with it. A tennis ball on a stick seems so much simpler.
Learning that this is the way that they do this answers many of my questions of how they make such realistic dragons in not only game of thrones, but many other shows like it. This idea is amazing, and just goes to show that the technical advances in our industry can make even the most mystifying experiences a "reality".
I love Game of Thrones, but at least in my opinion, the dragons are ok-ish.
I think some movies have better designed dragons but it's expected because after all GoT is a t.v. show and probably has much less budget than a fantasy movie.
The technology that they used to have the actors interact with the dragons is the exact same technology they used in Harry Potter to have the actors interact with Dobby the elf. In interviews, Danielle Radcliffe described a really similar process of interacting with a ping-pong ball.
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