Here’s how Mattes & Miniatures made it: a special excerpt from the miniatures issue of befores & afters magazine.
A wide array of the latest visual effects techniques–from CG dragons to LED walls–were used to help make HBO’s first season of House of the Dragon.
But the much older technique of modelmaking still came into play for a number of shots in the series.
This included for coastal views of the castle Runestone.
It was a landmark partly achieved via a model build by Mattes & Miniatures, overseen by Leigh Took, who worked with production visual effects supervisor Angus Bickerton to orchestrate the effect.
b&a: How did it come about that you collaborated with Angus Bickerton on this one?
Leigh Took: Well, I’ve worked with Angus for many years. We first started out on the original Tim Burton Batman film where he was running the motion control rigs and I was doing matte painting at that time. The great thing about Angus is that he’s one of these supervisors who has a wealth of knowledge going back many years in how things were done optically before digital came along. He’s still aware of what can be achieved. A lot of the time when shooting miniatures outside in natural light, you can achieve some amazing things.
So, we did a couple of other shots for him in the show, including the interior of a cave where the lead character climbs down to get an egg. We’d done that, and then Angus decided he wanted to shoot a castle as a miniature outside. He nodally mounted the camera so he could do a pan and tilt, so you can get some parallax with it. He decided that that’s the way he wanted to go so that when he came to post-production, he’d have something that they could manipulate and play with later on. So, the final shot was certainly ‘in-camera’, but then combined digitally with live-action.
b&a: What did you craft the castle from?
Leigh Took: The base is just polystyrene foam, which was carved, and then we made up some MDF and timber boxes, which we laser cut. For the texture on the brick work, we wanted that fine detail, so literally what we did was, when we got the box, we cut the windows in it and then painted on what we call Artex, which is the stuff they use on the ceilings and for building. And then a layer of, not talc, but we use this material called Fillite, which is ground-up pumice stone. We sprinkle that as our powder over the top, and then you press down onto it a silicone texture stamp, which presses through the powder onto the material underneath, and then you peel off your silicone stamp and blow the powder off and you’ve got this brickwork texture wherever you want.
Read the full story in issue #15 of befores & afters magazine.
All images courtesy Angus Bickerton. © 2022 HBO.
