““Game of Thrones” Season 7: Orchestrating Sea Battles and Blowing Up a Big Wall” by Hullin and Langlois

In this production session, we will share our story of working on the legendary show, “Game of Thrones, “since the series’ fourth season, detailing the learnings and knowledge we have gained from our multi-season experience on the groundbreaking show. We will go in depth on two of season 7’s most intense sequences, starting from the concept art and working through the processes that got us to the final shots.
Our long-term relationship with the filmmakers helped us anticipate their hands-on approach for art directing, which we took into consideration when planning for the Sea Battle scene in episode two and the dramatic fall of The Wall in the season finale.
At the session, we will share how we prepared to give the filmmakers freedom to play with the art direction, including how we set up a master scene file for the Sea Battle for this purpose. This nighttime battle contained a plethora of challenges, from simulations to CG environments, the CG ocean, and CG background ships mixed with compositing fire elements, which we will look at in the session.
For the season’s climatic finale, we created the first full view of The Wall at Eastwatch-by-the-Sea and then blew it to pieces, earning the 2018 VES Award for Outstanding Effects Simulations in an Episode. At the session, we will discuss the process of creating a flexible asset — The Wall — allowing for various possibilities for the art direction and simulation. We will also present the techniques we used to score the wall up to its dramatic collapse.