HBO’s Game of Thrones was honored with its fifth straight Outstanding Special Visual Effects Award at the Primetime Creative Arts Emmy® Awards, held Saturday, September 10 at the Microsoft Theater in Los Angeles. Praised as one of the series’ best episodes to date, the award-winning ‘Battle of the Bastards’ was a monumental undertaking, including significant visual effects (VFX) work from Deluxe’s Iloura, which helped craft the titular bloody showdown.
Iloura VFX Supervisor Glenn Melenhorst was honoured as part of the visual effects team that included Steve Kullback, Joe Bauer, Adam Chazen, Sam Conway, Derek Spears, Eric Carney, Matthew Roleau and Michelle Blok.
Melenhorst said, “Game of Thrones is such a successful and well-loved franchise so the chance to work on ‘Battle of the Bastards’ was hugely exciting. Steve Kullback and Joe Bauer have set an incredibly high bar for VFX quality and we made sure to keep that standard. I’m immensely proud of our Iloura team and grateful to have been a part of such an historic episode.”
Iloura artists used a mix of VFX and hand-crafted animation techniques to realise the vision of the pivotal battle, creating many photorealistic horse and rider collisions, 3,000-strong armies, a mix of close-ups featuring live-action and CG humans and animals and massive crowd simulations, as well as hundreds of assets – CG armoury, weapons, flags, saddlery, body parts and environmental assets such as blood, mud, smoke, fire and mist. See a behind-the-scenes video and details of Iloura’s work on ‘Battle of the Bastards’ here.
Deluxe President of Visual Effects, Ed Ulbrich, said, “The VFX work on this episode is just stunning. We’re incredibly proud of Glenn and the Iloura team for their contribution and honoured that our industry colleagues consider the work among the year’s best.”
“Congrats to all the Iloura team who either worked on the show or supported those who did. It’s a fantastic achievement and on the back of this year’s Oscar nomination for Mad Max: Fury Road, shows the world the quality of work we’re capable of producing.” Simon Rosenthal – Head of VFX, Iloura.
Iloura’s VFX work on ‘Battle of the Bastards’ also recently took home Gold in the TV Series category at Australia’s 19th Annual AEAF (Animation & Effects Awards Festival) Awards announced August 17 at the AEAF Awards night gala in Sydney.