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s u m m e r 2 0 1 9 c g w 4 1 performing as well. It was a lot of technology thrown together to achieve that," says Bauer. "If you were trying to keyframe that, you'd never get through it." For that animation, the studio used Sim Cycles, developed at Image Engine by Jason Snyman, animation supervisor, whereby a model retains its shape and maintains an animation cycle, but also dynamically reacts to another moving model as they touch. "The results turned out to be pretty cool and believable. You get really distinct interaction between the characters that I didn't quite expect," he says. "The characters are react- ing to each other as they collide, and the neighbor will then react to being bumped. The whole thing works together as this massive system." A month aer Snyman's initial test of Sim Cycles, Image Engine artists were using it on 13 shots of Drogon being attacked, with the dynamics passed from Drogon's move- ments to the swarming wights. A erial Fight While Weta was handling the fight on the ground, Image Engine animated the dragons and their riders (Weta lit, did the FX, and comp'd them into the scenes). According to Bauer, some of the biggest effects shots in Season 8 involve the dragon fight as Dany and Jon take to the sky pursued by the Night King and his dragon, Viserion, and then as Jon and Viserion face off in the courtyard. "There were so many pieces to it. The dragon fight was 100 percent an animation tour de force," he says. "The difficulty, too, was that it was taking place in the middle of a dense storm, at night. We had to show enough of these creatures, which are 200 feet long, so audiences could at least under- stand what was going on." Similar to the ground fight, Jon and Dany's aerial battle is partially obscured by clouds generated in SideFX's Houdini by Image Engine. "We had to lay out this entire aerial combat zone in actual scale so the dragons had perfect continuity from shot to shot, and as the dragons passed through a cloud, that cloud would become live and react to their movements," says Thomas Schelesny, VFX supervisor at Image Engine. Creating a lengthy sequence with just one person atop a dragon is challenging enough, but when you have two or three riders that are plate elements and com- puter-generated dragons, it's another thing entirely, says Schelesny, adding, "it be- comes exponentially more difficult to make that work as a cohesive performance." The Third Floor previs'd the face-off among the dragons, while Image Engine pre-animated the fight, then The Third Floor solved the pre-animation coordinates for the motion-control photography of the actors. Finally, Image Engine solved the actor plates back onto the dragon performance during the final animation of the sequence. The aerial dragon fight, craed by Image Engine as one massive animation, has the beasts clawing, biting, colliding. In all, the an- imation spanned 120 seconds, or thousands of frames. "Later we added the cameras because we needed perfect continuity from shot to shot, not just in their movements, but where they were spatially. On this show, we never cheated where we were in 3D space," says Schelesny. Snyman's pre-animation served as a guide for placement at specific points, "but everything around there was kind of free game," he says. "It had to work at all angles, because as soon as we had a camera following Jon, we might see a glimpse of the Night King in the background, or a wing, or a little claw, or a tail flick." As Snyman notes, the team maintained the chore- ography as well as all the camera work in the actual space of Winterfell, making sure M elisandre, the Red Woman, appears before the Battle of Winterfell in Episode 3, "The Long Night," and sets the Dothraki swords on fire. Her hidden identity was unveiled in Season 6, as she removes her necklace and her image is that of a frail, old woman in the mirror. Aer the battle, she walks across the snow-covered, body-strewn field and removes the necklace again, rapidly aging with each step until she drops to the ground. "We wanted to take things a lot further [from Season 6]," says Martin Hill, Weta VFX supervisor. To that end, Weta built a digital version of Melisandre that was emaciated – skeletal, with skin hanging off bones – as well as a full digi-double. Motion capture drove the collapse. As she stumbles, the artists blend-shaped between the digi-double and the emaciated version. Her cloak and robes hung off her body, driven by cloth sim- ulations. "Then we corroded her skin and hair, which became brittle and broke off," Hill adds. "Contrary to Crum, it was a less brutal Game of Thrones moment. We wanted it to have a beautiful effect because it was the end of a long night [for her and the others]."