How 'Game of Thrones' put together its biggest battle yet
"The Battle of the Bastards" is a marriage of complex VFX and practical effects.
If you're caught up on Game of Thrones, you're probably still reeling from last night's "The Battle of the Bastards." The show is no stranger to big battle scenes, but it was an episode that still managed to outdo anything we've seen before when it comes to large-scale mayhem (even last year's zombie-filled "Hardhome"). As you'd expect, it was all thanks to a smart combination of practical effects and CG, as the HBO behind the scenes feature below points out.
(Spoilers ahead, obviously.) To capture horses running at full tilt across the battlefield, director Miguel Sapochnik relied on a specialized remote controlled camera rig (dubbed the "Russian Arm") that was sitting atop a Land Rover. And to turn its hundreds of extras into thousands, the show's VFX artists implemented some heavy-duty crowd replication. There were also digital effects throughout the battle, including a swarm of arrows filling and falling from the sky, as well as composite effects weaved in to safely show things like soldiers flying off horses
Oh, and if you were wondering, that wonderful shot of Jon Snow confronting a wall of enemy soldiers on horseback, entirely on his own, was completely real.
