The proof-of-concept is usually just a capsule version of a larger creative project, made in hopes of selling it. But House of the Dragon cocreator and showrunner Ryan Condal only felt as if he’d proven he could helm a worthy prequel to Game of Thrones—the last TV series seemingly everyone watched—after it was already airing.
Because of various logistics puzzles in the post-production process, it wasn’t until early in the show’s run that Condal’s effects teams finally locked in the breath-stopping dragon chase that concludes the first season. A technical and storytelling marvel the show had been building toward all along, it looked like the stuff of dreams. Condal could now breathe easy. “Once I saw the final version of that sequence, I said, ‘Yep, okay, the show is gonna work,’” he tells Fast Company. “Because you’re gonna believe these dragon fights are real, and the riders are on the dragons and engaged in the combat, and this is only gonna get better from here.”
House of the Dragon continues the Thrones tradition of irresistible palace intrigue, punctuated by some of the most gruesome violence ever committed to television. But the evocative title isn’t just another name for the royal Targaryen family at the show’s center. This is the house of dragons, and the show delivers on that promise with vivid photorealism that feels plucked from an otherworldly nature documentary. Throughout the first season, House flexed its many distinctive dragons mostly by showing them soar through the sky with eye-popping majesty. The dragons clash for the first time, setting up a second season in which the Targaryen family is at war with itself—and so are their dragons.
Season 2, which premieres on HBO June 16, demanded an evolutionary leap in how the show depicts its marquee beasts, along with introducing several new (scaly, horned) faces. By the time it went into production, of course, Condal and company had long since demonstrated that they could rise to the challenge, and puff a mighty plume of fire right through it.
Here be dragons
Condal’s previous TV gig was running the alien-filled sci-fi series, Colony, which ran for three seasons on the USA Network. He went directly from that relatively low-profile series to working with Game of Thrones literary mastermind George R.R. Martin (and a nearly $20 million per episode budget) to breathe new life into HBO’s gargantuan hit. Based on Martin’s 2018 book, Fire & Blood, the prequel series is set 300 years before the Song of Fire and Ice saga that inspired Thrones. While it takes place within the same mythic landscape of its predecessor, the temporal difference allows for one major change: Dragons are now everywhere.
Game of Thrones certainly featured its share of dragons, but in a much different way. That show was set in a time when the creatures had already ceased to exist, but magically began to return. In fact, Daenerys Targaryen (Emilia Clarke) didn’t even ride one until more than midway through the series.
“That world had to pay service to the idea that these dragons suddenly exist again, which means that every time one flies overhead, you always have to do all the crowd looking up in awe at them,” Condal says. “Whereas in our world, dragons are a fact of life.”
When people look up at an approaching dragon in House, most of the time they’re squinting to see which one it is, rather than gaping at a miracle. Viewers can spot dragons in the background of the main onscreen drama sometimes, or hear them screeching in the distance. There is a whole infrastructure built around them, including a dragon pit and dragon keepers. Cordal’s team even added saddles, since those would have been appropriate gear for this setting.
Because dragons are a matter-of-fact aspect in the world of the show, though, they had to be more than just visually stunning. They each had to be as distinct as the people riding them.
How to train your dragon (to have a personality)
It’s prohibitively expensive to produce a new dragon for the show. First, the artists create a two-dimensional design, then a visual effects house has to put all the musculature together and essentially create a full 3-D model that they can animate and render. For that reason, Aegon II Targaryen (Tom Glynn-Carney)’s steed Sunfyre only appeared briefly within a wide shot of the first season. Sunfyre’s proper introduction in Season 2 demanded special consideration, though, because he is described in Martin’s book as the most beautiful dragon that ever lived. Condal and his team took great care to make Sunfyre appear attractive among the other dragons—more symmetrical, and more iridescent.
But dragons are more than their looks. “They really need to have a sense of sentience and personality,” Condal says. “They are individual characters, and that character is expressed through the way they look, the way they sound, the way they interact with their rider, what they do when they’re flying, and how eager they are to go into battle.”
Vhagar, for instance, is the largest and oldest living dragon in the show. She appears so large that she can’t even fit in the huge structures that have been built specifically to contain dragons. But that’s not how her character is conveyed. That comes across in the crotchety, cantankerous grunts she makes, such as when she’s made to sit down again after her rider Aemond Targaryen (Ewan Mitchell) has already made her do the work of getting to her feet.
Sound design plays a large role in getting across the dragons’ distinctions, whether it’s Caraxes’ moody high-pitched raspy shriek and heavy breathing—the result, Condal claims, of a deviated septum—or in Syrax’s empathic moans for her rider in an early scene of the new season. Paula Fairfield, who creates sound design for the dragons, blends sea animal noises, birds, and sometimes even human babies, to get the pitch just right.
Perhaps the most affecting displays of a dragon’s personality so far arrived midway through the first season. In a memorable scene, one character commands their dragon to shower them in immolating fire. The reluctance is plain on the dragon’s expressive reptilian face.
“We worked really hard on that,” Condal says. “We spent a long time trying to create that feeling of emotion from the dragon. And it’s quite tricky because you have essentially ultimate control over the dragon and can over-anthropomorphize them. You’re walking a line of not making the kind of silly movie dog who makes humanlike faces and expressions to pull at the emotional strings of the audience.”
Dragons at war
House of the Dragon’s titular beasts are elements of world-building and also characters, but they have a third function: instruments of war.
Throughout the first season, they’re used sparingly in this regard, and the only thing that had come close to an all-out battle was the ice dragon fight scene toward the end of Game of Thrones–which was famously too dark and too close up to deliver a strong enough visual punch. It was something Condal and his team set out to top in Season 2.
First, they looked back at the dragon footage from their first season, to see if it was possible to heighten the reality of the rider’s point of view. Working with new visual effects supervisor Dadi Einarsson, they improved the robotic arm that tracks the rider, to make it feel more visceral.
“We wanted to put the audience on that saddle with the rider,” Condal says. “It has a lot to do with where the camera’s positioned, having it in a fixed position that seems mounted. We call it ‘dragon to dragon shooting,’ like how a lot of horse chase sequences were done back in the day, which is a camera on a truck that’s bouncing as though it’s on another horse—or a World War II dogfight, having a camera mounted on another plane to simulate you being in the perspective of a plane, looking back at the hero plane that’s in the shot.”
In many ways, the jaw-dropping dragon battle scenes in Season 2 are the technical and storytelling culmination of everything the show has been doing with dragons since it began in 2022—world-building, character beats, and war all at once.
“That was the big, all-departments-hands-in, productional mountain that we climbed this year,” Condal says. “And as the sort of composer or whatever who oversees this massive symphony, it was deeply satisfying.”