A Blog of Ice and Fire
Dubbed the “March Madness” promo, this new video for season 6 features a few things already glimpsed in the official trailer, but also a few new details for fans eagerly awaiting the next season:
Interesting final frame.
Continuing the trend of highlighting the behind-the-scenes production of HBO’s Game of Thrones series, they have now released an interesting mini-documentary on the work of the prosthetics department. A whole lot of white walkers and wights to be seen. Interestingly, much of the white walker footage is from last season’s “Hardome”:
Suffice it to say, some of the glimpses of season 6 herein could be considered spoilerish.
Last month, courtesy of HBO, we were able to give an exclusive preview of one of the Histories and Lore from the Game of Thrones Season 5 Bluray set that’s to be released tomorrow. Along with that preview, we received a review copy of the set, and over the last weeks we’ve poked at its various extras to get a sense of what’s new.
On the whole, the extras this year are particularly noteworthy because of the addition of “Dance of [the] Dragons” animated feature fully 20 minutes long, featuring now-departed actors narrating in character (Harry Lloyd as Viserys, Michelle Fairley as Catelyn, Mark Addy as Robert Baratheon, Jack Gleeson as Joffrey, Pedro Pascal as Oberyn Martell, and Kerry Ingram as Shireen Baratheon) the story of the brutal civil war that hastened the end of the Targaryen dragons. The art style for this, and the other Histories and Lore, is somewhat different from that of previous seasons. It’s cleaner in a way, but also sometimes a little more simplistic, even cartoonish, at times. The level of content is, however, quite impressive as they drew heavily from the material written for The World of Ice and Fire to provide substantial insight into the past and present of both Westeros and Essos.
read on >>>Last year, Mackevision released a VFX breakdown of some of their contributions to the visually-impressive fifth season of Game of Thrones. Now another VFX company who worked on the production, Image Engine, has opened up about their work last year through an article on their site. The article includes the video you’ll see below:
The interview piece with VFX supervisor Matt Krentz—who’d worked with Look FX on two of the previous seasons—is particularly rich in additional detail. While a lot of their work as seen in the many before-and-after images seem like fairly straightforward crowd replications or removal/addition of elements, there’s also details about the 3D set extensions to Castle Black, their pipeline for creating all their work, and perhaps most notably details on creating the appearance of the “Night’s King” as seen at the end of “Hardhome”.
A Tuesday release for the trailer wasn’t anything that anyone expected, but the highly-anticipated Season 6 trailer is now out:
For fans interested in the next season, lots of digest here, including glimpses of a flashback to the fracas at the tower of joy.
A bombshell has fallen in the small world of television reviewing: HBO has stopped screeners for critics for season 6 of Game of Thrones. This is largely the result of well-publicized leaks from previous seasons—particularly the last season, in which the first four episodes were leaked weeks before the premiere—but for many critics the practice of receiving episodes early allowed them to spend more time considering and crafting their reviews. Now all the critics—at least, so far as we know—will have to write their reviews after episodes air.
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