Enter the Dragons

Angus Bickerton says his latest fixation is HBO's Succession. This should come as no surprise, seeing as how Bickerton was the visual effects supervisor for season one of HBO's House of the Dragon, a Game of Thrones prequel. The series, set roughly 200 years before the bloody GOT era, features an aging king whose family maneuvers and manipulates in hopes of attaining power once he passes. King Viserys, meet Logan Roy.

"I love their dialogue," Bickerton says via Zoom from his home office in London. "The dialogue is just magic ... and all the internecine schemes. In a way, House of the Dragon is Succession with dragons."

Lots of dragons. Far more, in fact, than Game of Thrones, which, over the course of eight seasons, featured only three — Drogon (Daenerys Targaryen's flying weapon of mass destruction) and twins Rhaegal and Viserion, which were basically the same dragon design with different colors. Conversely, the source material for House of the Dragon features twenty-two individual dragons. Nine of the firebreathing creations appear in season one, with five more to come in season two, now in production.

It takes a team of six to ten people around four months to design and build just one computer-generated (CG) dragon asset, Bickerton says. But those numbers can vary. "There's a lot of individuals doing different things — one's working on the muscle system, one's working on the skeleton, another one's working on how flaccid the skin is, etc." Bickerton estimates around 500 people ultimately worked on visual effects by the end of season one — "and that might be a low number."

He landed the job in 2020 when longtime Game of Thrones visual effects supervisor Joe Bauer opted out of the prequel. Hired at the height of the pandemic, Bickerton says his duties included building a staff and managing the department's massive workflow. But, he adds, "The first order of business was to get those dragons designed. Because we knew they would take a long time to build as CG assets."

Covid slowed the series' launch, which gave season one coshowrunners and executive producers Ryan Condal (also a cocreator) and Miguel Sapochnik (who also directed three episodes, and has since stepped down from coshowrunning the series) more time to think about the project. "By the time I joined," Bickerton says, "they were very clear they wanted each dragon to have a distinct look that told you about the creature's character through its design."

The first dragon Bickerton designed is a prime example of how he and his team used CG magic to reveal character in the fiery beasts. A deep forest green, Vhagar is about 120 years old, so she's the largest, since dragons keep growing their entire lives. "We did a kind of Usual Suspects lineup of dragons, so we knew all the relative sizes and scales," Bickerton recalls. "Vhagar is the ultimate weapon. She's infirm, but she's still got enough power because she is the biggest."

Bickerton studied nature to figure out how to convey Vhagar's advanced years. "We referenced a lot of the barnacle cling you see on whales," he says. "So there's a lot of barnacles on her skin." He also looked to "the pendulous skin of a large tortoise" for inspiration. "The necks are firmer the younger they are. And as they get older, they become more jowly."

The team was keen to add the tiniest of character details, even if they might go undetected by most viewers. "One little thing that we did," he says, "which took a long time to do — and it's really a throwaway — is I wanted to have little birds living on the dragon, like you see on hippopotamuses. They're feeding off the bugs and the life that lives in the hide."

And since the forever-growing dragons — those with riders, anyway — need sturdy saddle rigs, an old-timer like Vhagar has had multiple riders and saddle rigs over the years. (Over the course of season one Vhagar changed hands once, from Lady Laena Velaryon to a young Prince Aemond Targaryen, who tamed and claimed Vhagar as his own.) "She's got generations of rigging on her," Bickerton says. "That's why she's got all these ropes hanging down from her. Initially, when she was a lot smaller, they put crude ropes up there for the rider to hang on. And then they worked more and more [with] saddlery and leather. But what you see is this sort of ship's rigging hanging off her, because you have to climb up onto her. This is quite a big thing, you know. So we're trying to build a lot of backstory in there as well."

Bickerton says Caraxes — ridden by Prince Daemon Targaryen — was the most unusual dragon to create "because it's very long and almost looks like a red Chinese dragon. Daemon, being the sort of spirit of chaos that he is, they wanted him to have this curious, serpentine, slightly demonic dragon."

It can be a challenge to make something as wild as a dragon believable. Bickerton says his instinct is always to "make them more muted. It just makes them fit into the world better." But the showrunners, he says, wanted to "make the dragons distinctive, give them color and markings." He also got word that series cocreator George R.R. Martin, who wrote the book on which the series is based, also had a preference. "He didn't want them muted," Bickerton says. "He wanted them to actually have color."

Queen Rhaenyra Targaryen's dragon, Syrax, is a good example of Bickerton meeting Martin halfway. Syrax, who's been with the princess-turned-queen her entire life, is a muted, reptilian yellow that's in sync with the show's dark palette. "We're trying to reflect the person as well," he says, "so it's a more elegant dragon. Syrax has sort of swept-back horns." The detail he and his team added is a phrase Queen Rhaenyra carved into the dragon's horn in the high Valyrian dialect years ago. (The production hired a specialist to create a Valyrian language for the show, including all appropriate symbols.) As the creature has grown, the phrase has become slightly stretched and distorted on the horn.

Condal, according to Bickerton, was particularly immersed in the George R.R. Martin universe and came armed with that kind of specificity. "They wanted to put those details in, Ryan and Miguel — that believable extra layer of texture that you don't always have to register, but that grounds everything."

"It's quite a long and convoluted process."

Bickerton is referring to the monumental task of creating breathtakingly realistic scenes of various Targaryen family members piloting their fire-breathing flying dragons. "And the primary reason," he recalls, "is because we wanted to shoot the actors for real."

Shooting the actors "for real" meant forgoing the traditional green-screen approach and instead spending about eight months in design and pre-viz (pre-visualization), refining dragons, working with directors and cinematographers to block and shoot CG-generated scenes and employing hundreds of VFX artists from England to Germany to Canada to create all the footage — minus the actors — for each big dragon sequence. The actors then shot their scenes while immersed in this pre-viz footage as it screened inside the "volume," a state-of-the-art studio from George Lucas's Industrial Light & Magic. The volume's floor-to-ceiling, interactive, hi-def, LED screens configured in a seamless circle allowed for a giant 360-degree movie screen projecting eight months' worth of digital dragon flights and CG animation.

A computerized motion base, synced to the CG footage and fitted with a saddle, allowed each actor to move appropriately while pretending to ride a dragon that would be added later via CG. "We put the motionbased rig in the middle of [the volume] so that we could play the stormy cloud environment, so the actor would be lit by the screens effectively," Bickerton says. "The idea is that — particularly in a storm sequence where you've got lightning flashes going off and you've got a generally softer light — the screens are actually doing the majority of the lighting for you.

"Shooting in the volume — with multiple cameras, wind, rain and interactive [background] — made it as experiential as possible," he adds.

For all the state-of-theart technology and impressive CG content that's come from it, Bickerton says a more human moment near the end of the penultimate episode was among his favorites. It occurs when Princess Rhaenys Targaryen breaks out of jail and bursts through the floor of the Dragonpit atop her giant red dragon, Meleys, crashing Aegon II's coronation. The dragon is squared up with Queen Alicent Hightower, who was responsible for Rhaenys's imprisonment and should now be fearing the dragon's wrath. Instead, "You have a faceoff between this big dragon and Alicent — and the dragon just roars at her," Bickerton says with a laugh. "Meleys could have burned her alive. Instead, she just sort of endures horrible dragon breath."

Nearly as bad as a burn from Roman Roy.

This article originally appeared in emmy magazine issue #5, 2023, under the title, "Enter the Dragons."