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‘Game of Thrones’ VFX team shares its secrets in a behind-the-scenes video

Rising Sun Pictures Game of Thrones Season 6 VFX Breakdowns
HBO’s Game of Thrones has taken the world by storm like few television series have. A large part of this zealous fascination is owed to the incredible visuals the show captures and depicts in each and every episode.

Considering the show takes place in a massive land made up of seven kingdoms, it’s no surprise that much of the imagery is generated by computers. After all, who has room to build the entirety of King’s Landing, let alone the other scenes.

To show off just how much work goes into composing even the most mundane of clips from the show, the team behind Game of Thrones visual effects, Rising Sun Pictures, has shared a behind-the-scenes video.

Throughout the four-minute visual breakdown, Rising Sun Pictures shows just how much layering, compositing, and grading is needed to create the vast landscapes and ornate structures shown throughout George R.R. Martin’s world of ice and fire. It’s a visual feast for VFX junkies, whether or not you’re a fan of the show.

While much of Game of Thrones is filmed at Titanic Studios in Belfast, Northern Ireland, on-location footage has been shot in Croatia, Iceland, Malta, Morocco, Spain, Scotland, and the United States throughout its six seasons. We only see a small set of scenes in this particular video, but the sheer scale of the scenes shown is mesmerizing.

As a fair warning, much of the video contains scenes from the season-six finale, so if you’re working your way through the show, proceed with caution. If you don’t mind spoilers, or have already binged the entire series, carry on.

Season seven of Game of Thrones is still a year away, unfortunately, but if this video and previous seasons are anything to go by, it’ll be worth the wait. Every agonizing second.

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Visual effects process images of Gordy the chimp from Nope.

Get Out and Us filmmaker Jordan Peele's movies are always surrounded by secrecy in the lead-up to their premieres, and his sci-fi thriller Nope was no exception. The film follows a pair of siblings who discover that a series of strange events occurring around their family's horse ranch might be related to a mysterious object they've glimpsed in the sky.

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Jon Snow beyond the wall in Game of Thrones.

Though we're only two episodes into the new series, HBO's House of the Dragon has so far successfully captured the thrill of week-to-week dark fantasy epics, political drama, and overall excitement for the characters and world of Game of Thrones. A second season was already greenlit less than a week after the series premiere but with the recent bombshell of the Kit Harington/Jon Snow-led sequel series in development, it's worth revisiting the impact of the original show as well as its potential future.

Despite a final season that went off the rails, Jon Snow cemented his status as a pop culture fantasy icon and one of the most compelling characters in Thrones' main cast. As such, he's had a great spotlight in a handful of the series' best episodes.
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Morfydd Clark in The Rings of Power.

Even before Game of Thrones went off the air, there was rampant and wild speculation about which show might emerge that could replace it. Game of Thrones was, according to some, the end of an era where TV fans would all watch the same show and then spend the following week discussing the latest episode and speculating about what was to come. Recently, House of the Dragon has attempted to prove that Game of Thrones can be an heir to itself, but another show that has also entered the fray hopes to become something of a phenomenon.

Lord of the Rings: The Rings of Power has often been described as Amazon's version of Thrones. The company has invested enormous sums of money into the show, and it's set in a similar fantasy universe as Thrones, with flying creatures and human actors wearing bad white wigs. George R.R. Martin, the mind behind Game of Thrones, was a huge J.R. Tolkien fan, and wrote his own fantasy series essentially in response to Tolkien's totemic works. That's part of the reason why, whatever Rings of Power turns out to be, it has to be more than just a riff on Game of Thrones, even though its source material was created long before anybody sat on the Iron Throne.
Lord of the Rings and Game of Thrones are not the same thing

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