'House of the Dragon' s2: befores and afters with Rodeo FX

The plate was shot on a soundstage with a rather big footprint for the ground. Ulf was able to walk and capture the size of what would become a massive cave. The highly detailed set also gave us a starting point for textures, lighting mood and it already had a good sense of scale.

In this shot, we can appreciate Silverwing’s head fairly close up with a complex skin texture and shader, the eye looking at Ulf, softly reacting to the backlighting. One challenge was to make sure we could always sense and witness her enormous size in every shot. Here, we can read a touch of her silhouette in the depth, screen left, using some very subtle light bounces and soft atmospheric layers.

The Twins environment is based on a real location in the UK. Drone plate photography was captured to give us an overview of the look and scale. The bridge exists but we had to alter the middle part of it for the “on the ground” coverage needed. We also built the 2 towers on both ends of the bridge.
The real bridge sits at the top of a dam so we add to turn the lake into a wide river with mild directional current.

The whole environment was built with a full CG approach to account for multiple lighting scenarios. Trees and vegetation is based on real location but modified to look more dense and lush with any modernity features. CG river is simulated with a mild directional current and some nice break ups to help the scale and realism. We used the drone footage as ref to replicate a similar natural overcast lighting with a subtle amount of mist in depth.

This render shows all the intricate details modelled to create this highly complex city environment that is King’s Landing. The Red Keep in FG had to be updated from season 1 to be featured in multiple hero shots and much more close up to camera. The midground courtyard was built to match all the backlot sets where the street level shots have been captured. We needed to make sure the geography was really precise in order to help the audience to orient themselves and preserve continuity. Every piece of this environment was sculpted based on real life reference to maintain scale and realism.

This shot was a pleasure to light and comp. The overall mood of the show is fairly soft and overcast for the most part. We have tried many light directions before landing on this one to make sure we shape the Red Keep as the hero piece and main focus while the BG had to stay within a softer diffused sunlight to match the surrounding shots. The intention was to keep the lighting to be as natural as possible without overpowering the sun or adding too many atmospheric layers. We found a good balance to sell the scale while having a good amount of haze over the city.

Here’s a classic VFX plate shot against a blue screen using a laser pointer to guide the eye lines for both actors. You can appreciate the very natural and soft lighting on set successfully replicating an overcast and snowy day. The blue screen here is quite useful to create a cold bounce on the FG structure and actors. Once slightly desaturated, this blue spill is effectively recreating a similar bounce created in a natural environment.

The goal of this shot was to create an immersive shot perched on an overlook platform at the top of a 300+ foot high icewall featured previously in Game of Thrones. The shots leading to this one are showing a fairly windy and snowy cold day. Our environment, which is the hostile north side of the wall, had to look huge and wild with a massive open plane, tree clusters and a distant mountain range swallowed in the blizzard. The depth and haze had to be dialed in just right to sell the height and distance from the camera. We added some blowing snow and wind over the trees to really feel the cold and harsh environment. To help sell the coldness, we created a cg cold breath system driven by dialogue and affected by a custom wind to match the plate.