![]() It was the equivalent of Google Earth but at a lower resolution. “We did get a ton of data from NASA including satellite images from orbiters that have been sent to Mars. “We asked to be sent to Mars to shoot some plates and were told that it would be too expensive!” laughs Busquets. No practical plates were shot for the 34 minutes of full CG animation. We showed that to Ryan who was excited about it, and then we brought in all of those little animation cues of Oppy struggling trying to go in reverse and get out of that sandpit.” There were pockets of sand simulation that we did early on to show the wheel spinning and kicking out of the sand. We were working within a timeframe and budget and trying to make sure that visually it was telling the story that was supposed to be told there. We also had to work with some clever camera angles that would tell the story. When it came to the particular shot of Oppy getting her wheel stuck in the stand, we had some fairly detailed storyboards, but then we went through quite a bit of postvis animation to get the idea across of the wheel spinning. “We had to make sure that we get some fairly detailed storyboards going for key shots at least and rough storyboards for the rest that we would be doing which would then inform us in terms of the beats, length of the shots and how it’s sitting in the edit. “The documentary style of filmmaking is different from feature film,” Nair observes. Since visual effects was a new area for Ryan White, ILM produced storyboards and previs that also aided editorial. Then there are differences as to the environments that they were in, and those were kept realistic and true.” “All of those animation cues were respected, so we did animate Spirit differently than Oppy. “We respected the story, like when they needed to compensate for how Spirit was to be driven after one of the wheels broke,” Busquets states. The engineers at JPL were excited that we were breathing life into the rovers.” The models for Opportunity and Spirit were the same but treated differently. We had to keep all of those things in mind. ![]() ![]() We built up the rovers with some of the stickers that were on the prototypes and those were taken off when the rovers went to Mars. “We would send turntables of the rovers to the JPL and they would point out certain things that felt a little off, like how the robotic arm would bend and including the decals/details on the rover itself. “The rovers themselves are the most accurate versions of Opportunity and Spirit,” Nair observes. That’s what I like.”ĭata was provided by the NASA Jet Propulsion Laboratory. There are so many different environments and dragon characters. The bit I love is the sheer diversity of the work. We did a lot of 2D warping and distortion to make his neck thinner and get his face to be gaunt. We had to do CG for half the face of King Viserys I Targaryen in Episode 108, towards the end of his final days. Comments Bickerton, “In the tournament at the beginning of Episode 101, there are numerous face replacements. There was quite a lot of face replacement for action and storm sequences.” All of the actors were scanned to various degrees, depending on how much of their performance is needed. We tried to shoot an element for everything. “We used digital doubles for some of the fast action otherwise it’s an element of someone on a motion base, if it’s dragon-riding. “If you’re going to have character who is 1/10th the screen size of a dragon, then it’s a digital double,” Bickerton states. In Game of Thrones, they tended to add in bits when needed for each episode.”Īround 2,800 visual effects shots were produced for the 10 episodes. Our Visual Effects Art Director, Thomas Wingrove, brought in the different models, and we came up with our own fully-realized 3D environment because we wanted to be able to come back to it and know where everything was. Explains Bickerton, “They had been built by different facilities for each season, so we had about five or six different variations of the Red Keep and King’s Landing. Miguel wanted it to be dirtier, dustier, grungier than Game of Thrones because we are taking place 130 years before, so there was a lot of smoke, and King’s Landing has a nastier look.” Bickerton was give an eight-terabyte drive of assets from Game of Thrones by HBO that included the Red Keep and King’s Landing. They were small in frame but were a key element in bringing life to the shot. “I remember working on our first environment and asked, ‘Should we add some birds?’ And it worked. “The trick was to always have atmosphere-like particles in the air,” Bickerton reveals. There were no static 2D matte paintings as the camera always had to be fluid.
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