Last year, the final episode of House of the Dragon Season 1 aired, and it was exactly as terrible as viewers had imagined. Those who had read the novels were looking forward to this day with dread because the book contained another key character’s death scene. Lucerys Velaryon, Queen Rhaenyra’s second son, was returning from Storm’s End as an envoy when he was murdered by Aemond and his dragon Vhagar. Let’s take a closer look at what happened behind the scenes at this moment.
Pre-vis vs final shot of Lucerys and Aemond’s chase scene
In the final episode of Season 1, Aemond chases Lucerys to bully him with his enormous dragon Vhagar, but it ends up tragically. The entire sequence was filmed over several weeks, and you can see the difference between the pre-vis and final scene in the panel obtained by westerosies fan site.
Pre-vis vs final shot of Vhagar & Arrax chase scene in ‘HOUSE OF THE DRAGON’ Season 1 pic.twitter.com/vk2k1e7f0K
— westerosies (@westerosies) November 14, 2023
The story behind the VFX boards
House of the Dragon visual effects supervisor Angus Bickerton recalled in an interview how the team recreated the sequence:
“We animated the whole flight in Unreal, then loaded into Third Floor’s ‘Cyclops’ system. This is their particular version of a virtual camera; now you are in the scene, just looking for the coolest angles. We didn’t storyboard and then pre-vis; we did it entirely through these virtual-camera sessions.
We got very long takes. It’s not an animator sitting down and doing a five-second shot. Our visual effects editor edited that together, then we exported those files to another vendor who reanimated all the dragon stuff.”
