House of the Dragon fans spent the two years between seasons eagerly awaiting the Battle of the Gullet, a pivotal engagement in the Dance of the Dragons with serious consequences for both the Black and Green factions. When Season 3 finally kicked off earlier this year, viewers were thrown straight into the Gullet.
The episode consisted mostly of a naval engagement. The Black forces were led by Corlys “Sea Snake” Velaryon (Steve Toussaint) on his ship The Queen Who Never Was, while the Green forces were led by Triarchy leader Sharako Lohar (Abigail Thorn) on her ship The Bitchfist. The ships had to be built mostly on set to film the actors moving around on them, but also had to be animated for distant shots and effects-heavy moments. VFX supervisor Nick Epstein of Weta FX knew that was going to be one of the hardest challenges going in.
“Those ships were partially built on set in order for them to capture what they needed to film,” Epstein tells Gold Derby. “So the assets needed to be split and replaced and extended and so on, while holding up photographically next to their real-life counterparts. There was a lot of focus on building both those ships out. In the end, we were doing Pepsi challenges where you really couldn’t tell which was the digital ship and which was the live-action ship.”
Back in the early days of computer animation and special effects, water was known as the biggest problem. Decades later, water isn’t a problem in and of itself, according to Weta’s VFX supervisor Wayne Stables; as proof, just look at all the work Weta did on Avatar: The Way of Water.
But there are still plenty of specific challenges in working with water. Take the part of the Gullet when The Bitchfist is chasing The Queen Who Never Was through the ragged canyon known as the Kraken’s Teeth; that’s going to look different than the more open water in other parts of the battle.
“Water is a pretty well-established thing now. We know how to do it and we’ve got everything from large oceans to small sprays. It’s just really going through the whole development process of saying, well, what’s the nature of the water in this show?” Stables says. “How big is the chop, and the swell? When they’re inside the canyon, is it very still, or is it broken up? How much is it impacting the side? That just always takes a while to do.”
But as challenging as it is to animate ships and water exactly right, at least those things are real and recognizable. Bringing in the fantasy element of dragons is a whole other challenge, and the Battle of the Gullet prominently featured several.
“Each dragon has its own personality down to the way it moves and how heavy it is and so on, but also the materials you are referencing in reality to make sure that when it’s up there, even though it’s a bloody huge dragon, it still looks real,” Epstein says. “So Caraxes is very heavily influenced by snakeskin. Vhagar is like a cross between elephant hide and rhino hide. Vermax is a younger dragon, so we went more lizard and bat-like for the wing membranes.”
As readers of George R.R. Martin’s Fire & Blood knew going in, Vermax was doomed to die in the Battle of the Gullet alongside his rider, Jacaerys “Jace” Velaryon (Harry Collett). That tragic death was what the whole Battle of the Gullet was building toward, and the VFX supervisors knew it.
“A lot of the challenge was taming the water, because dragons are huge and they’re thrashing around and so on. You need to sell all of that interaction,” Epstein says. “At the same time, we really need to see, unfortunately, the pain in Vermax’s eyes as he’s really straining and the beats when Jace is getting shot by arrows. The simulations need to be there to service those moments. If the simulations aren’t quite right, viewers are going to notice that and it’s going to pull away from those emotional moments.”
Or as Stables puts it, “Those moments when Jace dies are a very small bit of the overall scheme of the episode. But if someone got all the way through the episode and then in that moment says, ‘hmm, that dragon looks a bit like a sock puppet,’ it would’ve trashed the entire episode. A few seconds of bad visual effects work can just destroy everything else.”
Thankfully, that didn’t happen. Stables knew Weta FX had succeeded when he was finally watching the finished episode with friends and family: “The fact that they had no idea what was real and what wasn’t, that was actually quite satisfying.”
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