HBO’s Game of Thrones was honoured with its fifth straight Outstanding Special Visual Effects Award at the Primetime Creative Arts Emmy Awards, held Saturday, 10 September 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 a historic episode.”
Iloura artists used a mix of VFX and hand-crafted animation techniques to realise the vision for 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.
Deluxe, president of VFX, 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.”
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 and Effects Awards Festival) Awards announced on 17 August at the AEAF awards night gala in Sydney.
FXX’s Archer won its first gold for animated series.