In Episode 4 of Season 2 of HBO's House of the Dragon, we finally got to see what the whole show has been aiming at since it started: dragon on dragon conflict.
HBO is justifiably proud of its work on House of the Dragon, and is more than happy to release BTS videos showing just how episode this and episode that was done. They're all a good watch - seeing production taking place on this scale is an experience, even on YouTube - but the one for S02E04 and the Battle of Rook's Rest really is something else.
There's a lot of love in this 19 minutes. The sheer numbers of people involved in staging the battle at Bourne Wood, just south of Farnham in Surrey (in turn just south of London), both in front of and behind the camera are astounding.
And then we get to the dragon battle. Spoilers ahead. Have a watch below:
Director Alan Little (the quote at the start is from him) and the team drive into the detail of how you shoot a battle on dragonback. A lot of elements have to come together to make it work, from the sequences filmed on an updated motion platform and synced motion control rig in front of a hybrid LED volume / greenscreen set up, to the practical pyro elements that get comped in to create the finished devastating effects.
The dragonback sequences are good (and from a narrative point of view are key to getting the emotional punch of the episode across), but the triumph of this episode for me is getting across the sheer size of Vhagar, the Queen of Dragons, as she rises above the trees. That was a genuine 'Hoy Shit' moment and rewound me back to sitting in a cinema as a kid and watching the mothership appear behind Devils Tower [sic] in Close Encounters of the Third Kind for the first time.
And, if you've read the books, you know there's rather more still to come...