The Art and Making of Dungeons & Dragons by Eleni Roussos

Author:Eleni Roussos [Roussos, Eleni]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Clarkson Potter/Ten Speed
Published: 2023-04-04T00:00:00+00:00

Icewind Dale

The film opens in Icewind Dale, a frozen tundra in the northernmost part of Faerûn. “Icewind Dale is a snowy ice landscape, very cold, very harsh,” explains Conway. “So, we had to kind of think along those lines. We made what appeared to be collectively a concrete car park [into something] that looked like an ice sheet. And we spent a lot of time experimenting with resins and stuff like that to give us that look.… Bubbles trapped in the ice and all that sort of thing. So, we did certain patches of that to help kind of sell that. And, also, all the snow dressing as well.… Just a blizzard look—fans and foams.”

Viewers will immediately understand the remote desolation of Icewind Dale from the opening shot of a horse-drawn transport carriage moving across a frozen river. “Sam Conway’s special-effects team was able to rig up a practical coach so that it felt like we had a coach that we could shoot here on an artificial snow thing that they laid down,” says Snow. “It’s a sled but it’s actually on wheels.” While the icy ground and carriage were created practically, the filmmakers would need to rely on visual effects to complete the shot. Plates—a photographic layer that can be merged, or composited, with the primary camera footage to create a final scene—were taken to help sell the scene. “We originally were planning to shoot the scenes in Iceland, but with COVID, with the pandemic, it was impossible to take everything we needed through to Iceland at the time,” recalls Snow. “We were able to send a crew over to take a bunch of plates and found some terrific locations there that we could shoot a lot of really cool backgrounds.… We had to sort of innovate and ended up shooting bluescreen on that and then tying that into these backgrounds that we shot previously in Iceland.”

“We shot aerial plates from a helicopter when we needed to be high off the ground, like wide shots when Edgin and Holga escape ,” explains Cordova. “We also shot a ton of footage ground level off of a specially rigged snowmobile for the carriage entrance, and off of a tripod in an Icelandic valley in the middle of nowhere for the ice chopping scene.… We were also very fortunate to witness the eruption of an active volcano while we were shooting plates in Iceland. The shot of Edgin and Holga riding past an erupting volcano was real, and shot off a helicopter in Iceland—my all-time favorite plate ever.”

Towering above the icy ground is Revel’s End, a remote prison that receives the nastiest of Faerûn’s criminals. The prison’s exterior gate was constructed for filming. “This was a practical build on the backlot where we build the exterior façade of Revel’s End,” says Chan. “The chain mechanism was engineered on a separate rig, so we actually pushed the entire carriage into the doorway almost like an airlock. So basically, the prisoner could never escape.”

While

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