HBO’s hit show Game of Thrones recently released its trailer for season 7 and the entire internet is already obsessing over what’s coming up with the new episodes. While everyone is busy discussing about attractive story line of the show, fascinating characters and royal theme, we took some time out to appreciate one more thing that makes the Game of Thrones one of the greatest shows on TV, its CGI Visual effects game strong!
In the world of Game of Thrones, there are dragons, giants, ancient royal architecture, huge castles, extremely high walls, gigantic armies, intense violence and many such scenes that can’t be seen in the real world, but in order to fill the show with life and make it look real enough that you feel yourself trapped in its abstraction, show creators use CGI (computer-generated imagery), an advance visual effects technique that helps creating images of a virtual reality on which this triumph show runs.
CGI isn’t only the show runner of Game of Thrones, almost all the TV series and movies use visual effects to portray the story of script accurately. Even in a non-fictitious show, CGI helps filling the details. However, in Game of Thrones, the green backdrop of CGI also needs perfect sets, props and costumes to give the best graphic results collectively.
The creators of Game of Thrones hire multiple visual effects studios to work on their theme, the requirement isn’t about how big the name of the studio is, rather how much efforts they’re willing to put in creating animations that have never been witnessed before. One of the most famous episodes from season 6, the ‘Battle of the Bastards’ was created by a small animation studio called “Iloura” in the total time span of eight months. Their team indeed left no space for criticism, and presented the best and immaculate graphic work on screen.
In the recent trailer of Game of Thrones showed the CGI work of the same level, but as the new season hits each summer, the graphic work in there keeps getting better and better. Comparing the visual effects of all the previous season, we can tell how the world of virtual reality and visual effects is running fast on development with the advancement in technology.
In the upcoming episodes of season 7, the CGI team did great work in maximizing the size of the dragons with perfect details of the dragons’ scales, horns and tail and their figure flying upward over the mountain, in the scene where Tyrion Lannister seems to be training or trying to be friends with dragons on a landscape. But we know that Tyrion is nowhere else but in a room having green backdrops everywhere, and rest of the work is on the CGI team.
Also, in the scene when Khaleesi enters into her home keep, and the doors of the Dragonstone castle opens to her and a beautiful black stone castle emerges. If something like that place really existed, it would have been one of the most expensive tourists spots, but great work CGI team, you literally made Dragonstone look so real and beautiful, even if it only exists on screen.
And the most epic one in which Drogon is flying over the army of Dothraki. Just Wow!
“CGI to the East, CGI to the West, CGI to the South, CGI to the North. Whatever demands to stand in our way, we will create it!” – Team Game of Thrones.