Game of Thrones season 7 episode 4: How the big battle scene in Spoils of War was shot

Game of Thrones season 7 episode 4 — The Spoils of War — will probably go down as one of the HBO epic’s most spectacular episodes. (Read the review here .) We’ve seen some huge battles take place on the show — just last year, we witnessed the epic Battle of the Bastards, between Jon Snow and Ramsay Bolton. Still, Loot Train Attack (or Battle of Tumbleton) upped the ante in an unforseen way. We had Daenerys Targaryen riding Drogon into battle, against the Lannister army, on their way back to King’s Landing after the sack of Highgarden. [caption id=“attachment_3910813” align=“alignnone” width=“825”]  Still from Game of Thrones season 7 episode 4[/caption] It ended with the Dothraki horde and Dany’s dragon, having laid waste to a whole field of Lannister soldiers, with Jaime Lannister very nearly meeting his end, and Drogon taking a spear to the breast. As brilliant as the sequence was to watch on screen, even more spell-binding is the way in which it was filmed. And proving that is a short 13-minute video put out by HBO, which shows just how that sequence was carried out. Think multiple cameras, high-power explosives, burning stuntmen and specially constructed stirrups (the last for the Dothraki archers who needed to balance themselves on galloping horses while they fired their arrows). Game of Thrones season 7: Why we're rooting for Jaime Lannister, and what that says of his reformation Director Matt Shakman explained how this scene was also different from previous ones involving Dany and Drogon wreaking some serious devastation: “I decided to shoot if from Jaime’s point of view to show what it was like to be on the other side of a dragon attack, (as Jaime is) trying to hold together his troops. (To show what it’s like) to be in the middle of watching the world change forever,” Shakman says in the making-of video. “It’s just complete annihilation,” says Nikolaj Coster-Waldau, who plays Jaime Lannister, of the scene. “He sees so many men just burnt to ashes. And there’s nothing h can do.” The cast and crew showed how the site for the sequence was set up in Los Barruecos, Spain. To find out how the Loot Train Attack was filmed, watch the video below: