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DGA QUARTERLY 57 On the slow-motion sequence where Arya kills the Night King, Sapochnik says the majority of it was shot at 96 frames a second. "It's all super-slow motion," he says, "all heightened reality, which is not what [we] usually do. It's a surreal nightmare." Two episodes after "The Long Night," Sapochnik outdid himself with "The Bells." This time, his one-sentence encapsulation was " What have we become?" Shot on an entire city set built in Belfast, Ireland, the gruesome, carnage-filled confrontation required roughly 650 extras, and utilized nearly every type of gear that Game of Thrones had to offer, including a Spider-Cam, three motion- controlled telescopic cranes and an Artemis handheld stabilized camera. In this episode, Sapochnik not only broke Shakman's burn record by setting 22 people on fire (twice), he con- ceived of a nonstop tracking shot, following Arya, a sort of tour guide through the chaos and horror of war as she races through King 's Landing as it topples, surrounded by the moaning, bloodied and dying. "It was meant to, ultimately, come across as a seven-and-a-half-minute nonstop shot, where you follow her on the run," Sapochnik explains, but he ultimately intercut the shot with a thematically related fight sequence. The buildings were designed to be built and also destroyed, each with its own manifold plumbing system that snaked through to doors and windows so that they could be set on fire with practical effects. The trick was building the sets in their destroyed stages first, and then the perfect sections were added on top to make for a quicker changeover during pro- duction. Again, Daenerys uses her dragon as a tool of mass destruction, zoom- ing downward from the sky like a low-flying, fire-spitting warplane. "Each year we've tried to better the dragon-riding experience," says Sapochnik. "This year we did the usual motion-control passes, but we also got someone to puppeteer the massive elec- tronic buck and I did a lot of straight handheld work in the close-ups because it was faster and looked better. But the general rules are trying to keep it real. Don't make the camera do loop- the-loops or squeeze through impossible gaps. I quite like treating it as wildlife photography where one is often chasing the subject, so it feels like it's unrehearsed." Nutter, Shakman and Sapochnik all agree that directing a Game of Thrones battle sequence— each, as Nutter puts it, "with its own voice, rhythm and melody" and all of them massive, with dozens of moving parts and with all the equipment and skilled experts at your disposal— is a self-esteem booster. "It made me better at my craft, I think," says Sapochnik. "I never thought it would, but it seems that confidence inspires confidence and makes everyone up their game. It also allows me to confront problems more quickly and get past them." ® Scenes from Season VIII: "The Long Night" and "The Bells" PHOTOS: HBO