How Were The Flaming Dothraki Swords Created For Game Of Thrones Episode, The Long Night?

The impressive battle in The Long Night is hauntingly revealed in fiery attacks that crash through the darkness.

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The first charge of the Dothraki begins with a vast army wielding swords that are ignited in a wave of fire by the will of Melisandre. Our job was to set every Dothraki sword on fire to persuasively signify the battle had begun.

We initially approached the task through our standard pipeline, building a library of fire swords in FX and tracking them as 2D cards. But when we received the turnover, we realised how time consuming this would be, especially for comp. There were hundreds of Dothraki and each fire element would need to be hand-tracked, as well as the timing offset to match the motion and choreography in the plate. A few real flaming swords were shot on the live set, and for safety reasons they could only use them on the first row. The rest were LED props designed to cast interactive light on the characters.