This week, we have…

• A fun fact inspired by Fictogram

• Answers to last week's games

• Reader survey

The Visual Magic Behind Game of Thrones

Dragons, giants, and White Walkers, oh my! The TV show Game of Thrones, which ran from 2011 to 2019, had a host of magical creatures, as well as iconic characters like Daenerys Targaryen and Joffrey Baratheon (Fictogram guest #461). Making a show like GoT requires a tremendous amount of special and visual effects. According to the visual effects producers, by the time the show got to season 8, there were 3150 shots, and the special effects team worked on all but 10. 1300 alone went into one episode, The Long Night.

The visual effects team, lead by Joe Bauer and Steve Kullback, start off every season by reading the script and then hitting the ground running to figure out how to make everything come to life. If the script has a character riding a dragon, or a town being destroyed, it's their job to figure out how to make that happen. Bauer and Kullback say that they try to create as much of their effects as possible on set, so that everything looks realistic alongside the show's principal photography. For instance, in a scene where 20 characters caught on fire, the team attached a flamethrower to a nation controlled camera crane, and actually set fire to stuntmen, setting a new record for the number of people ignited at once.

The show's visual effects requirements grew with the show itself. In season one, there were 17 weeks of post-production, while season eight required 42. Costs also increased, with episodes in the first season costing about $6 million, which ballooned to $15 million by the end. With the growing budget there were growing demands - such as Daenary's dragons, who had to believably be ridden and breathe fire. The visual effects team built a section of the dragon's back, mounted on a motion rig, so that actors could shoot their close-ups with realistic movements. They also had to build, and explode, a very large scale miniature of a town rather than reconstructing the entire thing with CGI, so it would look more realistic.

Learn more: Entertainment Weekly, CBC, VFX Voice

Trivia

Answers to last week's games

Monday, February 17 to Sunday, February 23.

Linxicon

The following are the shortest paths from last week:

• #371 buck → dollars → money → truth → true → still → yet

• #372 pleasure → delicious → food → abuse

• #373 urban → city → traffic → busy → meanwhile → although

• #374 suffer → drown → swim → beach

• #375 protect → immunity → cough → sigh

• #376 hospital → inpatient → ongoing → continued

• #377 possible → feasible → buyable → purchase

• #378 Play now!

Elemingle

• #26 Niobium

• #27 Protactinium

• #28 Neodymium

• #29 Strontium

• #30 Thulium

• #31 Nickel

• #32 Moscovium

• #33 Play now!

Forgeous

Play Forgeous for Feb 24