If you think that the three dragons from "Game of Thrones" are already pretty huge, think again.
VFX supervisor Joe Bauer spoke with Yahoo! TV and said that "the dragons will again be double in size" come season six, so Drogon, Rhaegal and Viserion will surely put more fear into people's hearts.
The graphics department will have no problem working on the dragons' growing size, but it might cause a problem on set.
"When the dragons were small, we had little foam rubber models of each dragon and we could carry them on and off of the set and it was no big deal. Last year, the best we could do was a head and this year it's going to be a fingernail or something, I'm not really sure," Bauer said.
He recalled their work back in season three, when the dragons were still quite small. Even as they flapped, they stayed in one place. But now that the dragons, particularly Drogon is over sixty feet long, wingtip to wingtip, they decided to pre-animate Drogon and program his movements into a motion control rig holding a fifty-foot flamethrower.
It was such a big fire stunt that, "We accidentally set the record that had been previously held by 'Braveheart' by burning 21 people in one day. It wasn't our goal; it just happened to be the case," said Bauer.
And even though they were weighed down by time constraints and can only do the scene once, they still managed to do so with no more than "one small blister on a pinkie" worth of injuries.
In the recent episode "The Dance of Dragons" where Danerys had to climb on top of Drogon then fly, the special effects department had to build a full-size "buck" attached to a hydraulic rig in order to capture that magical scene.
Show creators Dan Weiss and David Benioff will sometimes offer input on how they want things done, but Bauer feels very fortunate that their visions are pretty much similar and that is why they have no problem working together. "We all seem to be seeing things in the same way," he noted.
The show's next season will take audiences to even more complex and impressive places so the graphics team definitely has more on their plate.
"Between season three and season five, our shot count doubled," explained Bauer. There will also be "other environments that we haven't seen people in before."
