The bloody set-piece at the heart of the most expensive episode of Game of Thrones ever was made in Australia.
The day after the season six finale aired, and a little over a week after the landmark Battle of the Bastards episode screened, Melbourne post-production house Iloura was finally allowed to share with the world its pride in having pulled the strings in the 22-minute battle sequence that saw a giant, hundreds of horses and thousands of soldiers fight it out to the bloody end as Jon Snow (Kit Harrington) and his sister Sansa Stark (Sophie Turner) attempted to reclaim their family seat, Winterfell.
"Battle of the Bastards is shocking in its audacity," said the show's visual effects producer Steve Kullback in a statement. "More shocking still that we pulled it off, and so much credit for that goes to Iloura.
How Wun Wun was added to the battle sequence. Photo: Iloura/HBO
"We are up close and personal in this battle with CG horses and collisions right in front of the lens and we constantly needed to review Iloura's shots side by side with the photography because it was hard to remember, and even harder to see, the difference between what was shot and what was added. Amazing."
Iloura boss Simon Rosenthal admits this wasn't just the first Game of Thrones episode he had worked on – it was the first he had watched.
"I'd never seen it before we got the job," he said, "though my wife is a huge fan".
Iloura was invited to pitch for the job because it had built computer-generated horses before, for Seth MacFarlane's A Million Ways to Die in the West (2014) and for Charlotte's Web (2006).
Horses collide during the Battle of the Bastards. Photo: Iloura/HBO
But despite having those equine runs on the board, they still had to prove they were up to the task of creating dozens of believable battle-ready horses, as well as replicating the real-world soldiers in order to create hordes.
Testing and development took two or three months. The build itself, led by supervising effects producer Glenn Melenhorst in the firm's South Melbourne studio, began in October 2015.
The last "assets", as the computer-generated images are called, were delivered in June, just weeks before the episode aired.
The horses were created from the inside out. "We had to build muscles for them, a whole articulated skeletal structure," says Rosenthal. "The trick is to get photo-real animals behaving in a real-world way. It's a two-part challenge: Part A is to get the asset looking right, and part B is to get it behaving right through the animation."
The visual effects used during Jon Snow's encounter on the battlefield. Photo: Iloura/HBO
Anyone who saw the remarkable battle sequence will likely agree that they succeeded on both fronts.
But such work doesn't come cheap. Rosenthal won't say what the budget for the episode was, but he concedes it was "fairly extravagant – but the fan base has an incredibly high expectation of this show that demands to be met".
And what of his own expectations? Is Iloura likely to be working on the next season of Game of Thrones?
"They were pretty happy," he says. "I'd like to think there's something in it for us in the future."
