HBO's zombie polar bear sequence

HBO’s epic television series Game of thrones has delivered some jaw dropping battles sequences, with this HBO has released some killer behind the scenes as to how they achieved these amazing battles with the use of digital and piratical effects. Last night’s episode gave us the zombie polar bear which in my option is the coolest monster the show has produced so far.

The sequences itself is about 2 minutes long and conciest of a super-sized undead polar bear killing three members of this group whilst mauling the fourth, the director Alan Taylor approached this sequences by shooting on set with three green screen walls and by having the VFX team mock up a pre-vis of the fight, this would help give the actors and stunt men an idea of what they’re facing in a lot of cases actors must imagine these kinds of things which presents extra challenges. The first scene they filmed involved the three red shirts, one was thrown onto his back and mauled to death, the second is wiped across the face and the last one is flung towards the camera. As the bear is completely CG, the two stuntmen are put on wires and swung across the set with blood being added digitally. They did have a motion capture actor acting out the bears movements towards the actors just to get there eye level and movements just right, there an amazing shot of the bear knocking over one of the actors and before it can take a bite out of him he puts his sword in the way blocking the bears jaws, this all happens whilst the sword is a flame and so is the bear. Now I assumed that they had the actors act this all out from his prospective and then they would just merge the CG bear and the actor, but I was partly right they build a bear head rig set the top part a flame and had a man in a green suit control its movements all whist the actors was holding a flaming sword and being dragged around.

Part of the final sequence just showing the break down of the bear, set and actors