Issue link: https://digital.copcomm.com/i/884568
s e p t e m b e r . o c t o b e r 2 0 1 7 c g w 1 3 talked to ILM [which craed the bear for the film], but they were pulled onto another job, so we met with Weta and it was right up their alley, really." Data was collected from location shots with stunt performers: One wore a bear's head armature, while "victims" on wire rigs were tossed around like rag dolls. This infor- mation was given to the Weta team, which then "dug into the model, deciding how far to take down the bear before it stopped looking like a polar bear and became a burnt dog," says Bauer. Animators also had to de- termine "how much to muck up the bear's run cycle. We Frankensteined it at first, with stiff legs, but that inhibited the performance too much so we backed away from it." Weta also had to create CG fire for the zombie polar bear, the first instance where the show set out to make synthetic fire a visu- al effect. "We love to shoot organic elements and do so for fire all the time," says Kullback. "But with the bear, we had no choice, and Weta pulled it off very credibly. They did CG fire on the Planet of the Apes movies, so we felt it would be no problem for them." Reference footage of the bear-head stunt performer with gas jets spitting fire showed the Weta team what fire would look like in the lighting conditions and environment. The "Field of Fire" attack on the loot train in Episode 4 of Season 7 cued off concept art by Robert Simon, photo references pro- vided by the director of oil fires and Ground Zero post-September 11, and full previs. Spydercam footage captured on location in Spain drove the dragon POV coverage. Image Engine animated Drogon for the attack, which Bauer calls "some of the most beautiful performances we've had." Iloura craed the epic environment reminiscent of the American West's Monument Valley. In addition to large-scale pyro and practical smoke, Screen Scene "really stepped up with a huge amount of CG fire and smoke work," Bauer adds. Frozen in time In a season of can-you-top-this moments, perhaps most spectacular of all was the ice wall sequence in the Season 7 finale. The Night King rides on the back of the ice drag- on Viserion, who breathes blue fire on the ice wall, melting and shearing the protective structure. Its destruction and the horror un- leashed by its breach foreshadow the next, and final, season of the show. Parts of the 300-mile-long ice wall had been craed by various VFX vendors since Season 1, but this year audiences saw the Eastwatch section and how the wall tapered into the sea at "the coldest, most barren, forgotten end of the world possible," says Bauer. Live-action plates were shot on a vol- canic beach in Iceland. Concept Artist Floris Didden, cofounder of Karakter in Berlin, pro- vided amazing art, which was enhanced by Rodeo FX's Deak Ferrand, who stair-stepped the ice wall down to a man-made jetty. "A realistic model was developed to show a thousand years of wear and tear from the ocean: ice floes melting and refreezing, the erosion of the waves, ramshackle bits of an ill-maintained man- made structure," says Bauer. Rodeo FX built the environment sur- rounding the ice wall and modeled, shaded, and set dressed the icy barrier; the studio then craed the collapse of the wall. "We had to cover a lot of distance with the wall, so we separated the wall into three parts – the closer part that is destroyed in high res, the middle part that still stands, also in high res, and the farther part in low res as a base for the digital matte paintings that complet- ed the look of the wall," says Patrice Pois- sant, Rodeo FX's CG supervisor for Game of Thrones Season 7. "It was a big challenge to match the concept art, but we're happy with the final result." Rodeo FX received "beautiful" location plates of the volcanic beach, but so much was added that the shots became "al- most fully CG," Poissant notes. "The wall and its surroundings were seen from all sides. Among other elements, we added trees, the castle, wooden structures on the wall, snow on the rocks, and birds." For the wall's dramatic collapse, Rodeo FX scored the wall to break it apart in multiple shots. "We received a previs as reference for the timing and the size of the collapse, then layered effects on top of that," explains Poissant. "Artists added secondary debris, smoke, and interactive fire when the fire hits the wall. For the actual collapse of the wall, we created debris, powdered snow, and wa- ter splashes as the ice fell into the sea." Real