‘House Of The Dragon’ Craft Heads On Expanding The “Visual Legacy” Of ‘Game Of Thrones’

As a prequel to Game of Thrones, House of the Dragon posed a creative challenge: how to develop a new and distinctive style while respecting the set-up of the previous series. This challenge fell mainly to the craftspeople, whose work resulted in eight Emmy nominations for HBO this year, including Outstanding Drama Series. 

Of the 10-episode season, two episodes garnered the bulk of the nominations. The first is “The Heirs of the Dragon”, which introduces the series and brings the audience into the world of the Targaryen royal line. The second is “The Lord of the Tides”, which sets up the devastating war of succession, known as the “Dance of the Dragons”. Here, those Emmy-nominated craft department heads give insight into how they recreated the world of Westeros.

“The Heirs of the Dragon” sets the stage for the series and establishes the design of the world. “The approach was to embrace and expand the world while at the same time retaining an audience familiarity with that world,” says production designer Jim Clay. The design of King’s Landing was similar to that of Game of Thrones, but this version of the castle was created in a time when dragons were more prevalent, so it needed to be able to house them and give more reverence to fallen dragons.

“We owed it to the audience to make sure we reference the visual legacy from Game of Thrones, both in design and quality,” visual effects supervisor Angus Bickerton says. While taking the past into consideration, Bickerton also says they needed to deal with one major difference between the two series—dragons are an accepted part of Westeros in this time. “It was always George R. R. Martin’s intention that the dragons were diverse and colorful, so the primary design goal at the start of pre-production was to create the distinct characters.”

Accompanying the visuals, sound supervisor Al Sirkett had some Game of Thrones veterans on his team to help flesh out the world. “I knew having them on the team would help create a world that was not specifically identical to that of Game of Thrones, but it definitely helped to have them as part of the continuing DNA of this new show,” he says. “With Paula [Fairfield]’s fantastic work on creating the dragons’ voices and personalities, and the rich textured crowd work and attention to detail that Tim [Hands] always brings to his work, building these new grand scale environments was always going to come from the same headspace as Game of Thrones.”

The presence of dragons also influenced a lot of the decisions in creating the costumes for the Targaryen house, such as the helmet and engravings of Daemon [Matt Smith]’s jousting armor. The blacks and reds were taken from the Targaryen crest, as costume designer Jany Temime wanted the royal outfits to reflect their position of power. “The story happens hundreds of years earlier, when the Targaryens were at the top of their power, so the look had to feel powerful, luxurious and slightly decadent,” she says.

The tournament held in the first episode also presented an opportunity for Temime and costume supervisor Joanna Lynch to give a sense of the rich history of Westeros, as royals from all over attended. “[The tournament] showcased a wide variety of costumes on both principal cast and the crowd—handmade bespoke armor, castle life, King’s Landing citizens, royal courtiers and our lords and ladies from all over Westeros,” Lynch says.

Although the emphasis on dragons gives the series a fantasy tone, cinematographer Catherine Goldschmidt’s approach to the story was more in line with a historical epic. “The color palette of Game of Thrones was constantly shifting to define the different worlds, but House of the Dragon is about one family in one place, so the palette could be more connected to character and story rather than location,” she says. “That meant grounding our choices in reality as much as possible, and striving for a more classic and considered approach to camerawork.”

“The Lord of the Tides” is a prime example of that approach, as the long dramatic scenes of the Velaryon succession hearing and the family dinner were more character focused. “Our challenge was to visually show the shifting relationship dynamics between them,” she says. “Director Geeta Patel and I chose to focus our camera choices mostly on the hero triangle of King Viserys [Paddy Considine], Rhaenyra [Emma D’Arcy] and Alicent [Olivia Cooke], and their character arcs in particular informed our choices for blocking, lighting and lensing.”

Throughout the season, the declining health of King Viserys as he succumbs to leprosy was a major story point and needed to be shown visually. Prosthetics designer Barrie Gower, who previously worked on Game of Thrones, was responsible for repurposing some of his old designs in a subtler way. “King Viserys’ disease was reminiscent of some of the prosthetics we created for Game of Thrones, such as The Mountain who also wore decomposing prosthetics,” he says. “We were able to tell Viserys’ story in several stages, from very subtle prosthetics to extensive facial and body appliances.” 

There were five stages of makeup for Viserys up until the most aggressive stage of his disease which is shown in “The Lord of Tides”. To create the looks, Gower says his team of artists used “subtle thin prosthetic textures and art work, hair-punched silicone bald pates and extensive silicone facial and body appliances.”