Art of the Title: It’s interesting that you were trying to answer these practical problems even though it would eventually be created all in the computer. You're still asking questions like, "Well what's beyond the horizon, is it a room? Oh, so let's make it a sphere" or "How do you light it?" as opposed to just saying "Well it's lit."

Angus Wall: One thing that was really important was to make it feel like it was a physical thing and not to use CG as a kind of “magic camera.” I thought about it in terms of shooting practically with a motion controlled camera. I think you’d have to shoot everything with motion control due to the narrow depth of field and size of the camera moves, but the whole idea was to make it feel real. Early on, we did a test render of the Red Keep, which is the main structure at King's Landing. We placed the fully rendered model on a CG board skinned with a sample of beautifully damaged plywood, and showed it to the executives. Somebody said, "We didn't know that you guys had a workshop." And at that point we knew we were on to something... that the artists working on the sequence had really started making something extraordinary.

King's Landing concept art (Click to Enlarge)