Stop reading if you haven’t seen Season 4, episode 10 of Game of Thrones, titled “The Children”—unless you enjoy spoilers.
When we first learned that this past Sunday’s Game of Thrones finale, “The Children”, was submitted by showrunners Dan Weiss and David Benioff for an outstanding-prosthetic-makeup Emmy, we knew the effects team would be pulling off something even more impressive than that Oberyn Martell head squish—and boy, did they deliver.
The episode’s major action sequence—a Ray Harryhausen-esque battle between skeletal undead and Bran, Hodor, Meera, and the doomed Jojen—was unlike anything we’d seen before on the show. We just had to know: How’d they pull off the not-quite-human movements and horrifying-looking decomposition? So we reached back out to Game of Thrones visual-effects supervisor Joe Bauer and prosthetics supervisor Barrie Gower, the same dynamic duo responsible for Martell’s gooey demise. Turns out: the sequence combined stunt acting, C.G., and practical effects—an unusually extensive mixture of digital performance interaction with human players that will make for tough competition come Emmy time in August. Here’s how it was done.
(watch the fight scene in full)
Joe Bauer: These are “wights,” which are corpses animated by the magic of the White Walkers. Wights can be animated at any stage of decomposition, from a fresh kill to the bony folks you saw in episode 10. During production we referred to them by the names of their stunt performers. For example, the wight that faces off with Hodor is Maxine [played by Maxine Whittaker, who also happened to be Anne Hathaway’s Catwoman stunt double in The Dark Knight Rises]. She’s missing a jaw but is otherwise a game girl.
We started concepting the wights very near the start of Season 4 preproduction. We had to decide on a process and much of that would be determined by their appearance, how intact or rotten they eventually were.
Barrie Gower: It’s got such a lovely fantasy element, it almost goes back to the Sinbad movies and Ray Harryhausen—they were definitely footnotes. The creators were quite interested in having these skeletal figures that—using the effects tools and modern-day techniques—could be an advanced version of the stop-motion procedure that Ray Harryhausen used to do years ago.
Bauer: Ray Harryhausen’s skeleton fight was definitely a touchstone for the sequence—skeletons crawling out of the ground and fighting could be nothing else. Their movements, however, were choreographed by our stunt team much like any other fight on Game of Thrones—which was our goal to keep things familiar and production-friendly. Even the wights that were eventually entirely CG were rotomated off of the stunt performer’s movements and interaction with our heroes.
Gower: We didn’t shoot until about October of last year, but we did a test on one stunt performer in July. We did a full-body life cast, and then we created appliances for his head and this green body stocking with a ribcage and bones. Then Joe and his department took that footage and removed green elements . . . they basically constructed a 3D model of our prosthetics and they animated them.
Bauer: When we got around to making the actual sequence, we sometimes went full C.G. I’d say the ratio was 70 percent C.G. to 30 percent C.G./prosthetic hybrid.
Gower: He’s being very generous there! Watching the scene back, I can definitely recognize elements that we produced for the scene. We produced a half-torso character to jump onto Hodor’s back at one point, when he’s fighting two of the wights, so we had a dummy torso on his back that he could wrestle with. There were a few key elements of the faces that I recognized as our practical effects, but they’ve also been enhanced to a certain degree by Joe’s department. I think originally it was always intended that we’d be some kind of tool that they could either completely recreate themselves or they could manipulate. We always knew it was going to be this incredible collaboration, so I’m quite grateful that I can still recognize a few little bits and pieces here and there that were ours.
Bauer: The stunt performers wore green leotards that had bits of rubber bone and dressed costume affixed to them. The performers executed the fighting with our hero actors, then they stepped out and the actors performed their part of the fight again. That gave us the option of going full C.G. later if we wanted to.
Gower: I think we did something like seven wights in total. We did four or five complete green-screen suits with prosthetic makeup, and then we did three or four head and shoulders and arm prosthetics. . . . I was there [on set for shooting]—we had a team of something like 12 prosthetics guys there . . . a couple of them per character. We shot in a quarry in Northern Ireland, I think it’s called Lady Hill. We shot for about a week, and the whole sequence was scheduled really well, really right to the wire. Hats off to Alex Graves, really—it just proves what a great action director he is. This is definitely the first time I’ve worked so closely with digital effects.
Bauer: It definitely represents the most extensive use of digital performance interaction with human characters. The dragons are entirely digital, but thus far their physical interaction with humans has been minimal.
Gower: The majority of our work is seen in the last episode, really. We saw episode 10 as more of a broader scale of our work, because we had different characters and different techniques—it wasn’t just blood and gore. . . . Other than the wights battle, we had the three-eyed raven character—the old man in the tree, he is wearing full facial prosthetics. We had some of the big battle between The Hound and Brienne as well, at the end where he’s kicked over the ravine and breaks his leg—we did burn makeup and all the injuries there. And we also had The Mountain, at the top of the episode lying on the laboratory table—you have all kinds of pus and poison drained from his wounds that he sustained at the fight with Oberyn.
Bauer: We also made it [“The Children”] our [Emmy] submission for digital effects. Episode 10 had a wide variety of digital work, which makes for a good entry. And I don’t believe most people have seen anything quite as outlandish and extensive in the arena of broadcast visual effects as our digi-prosthetic wights!
