Westeros

Back in September, fans stumbled across the blog of photographer Wolf Sunkmanitu, where he stated he had stumbled across a set on Malta for HBO’s Game of Thrones. Now, on the verge of the first season filming wrapping, he’s posted an extensive gallery of his photography from Malta ... including quite a few pictures from the Street of Steel set in Mdina which we caught glimpses of in the “Inside Game of Thrones” preview starting here.

At Sunmanitu’s gallery, the first of the Street of Steel photos—available for purchase as prints, as with the rest of his galler—can be found starting here. The amount of set dressing and the great number of quite mundane props—bellows, anvils metalworking tools, and more—has certainly transformed what’s nomrally a thoroughfare through modern Mdina into a bazaar-like street in King’s Landing. I do believe this room is the same as Tobho Mott’s forge, seen
here.

Valyrian Steel has written up a new post with some photos of Ice, their officially licensed replica of the ancestral Stark sword. These photos are interesting because they’re setting the weapon besides the two previous weapons they’ve made, Longclaw and Needle. The current plan is for a special premium limited edition of Ice to be made out of Damascus steel, for those who wish to have something so exclusive, while Valyrian Steel starts work on designing the next weapon in the line: King Robert’s famous warhammer.

Sometime on Wednesday afternoon or evening, the last, “Cut”, will be called, and the first season of HBO’s Game of Thrones will have seen filming completed. The wrap party already took place this past weekend, as much of the foreign crew will be gone by this coming weekend, departed back to home. What’s left now is weeks more of post-production, such as introducing scoring, visual effects, and so on. We already know the writing and production team will be doing preparatory work in case the show gets greenlit for a second season, so we expect at least a couple of scripts and a good deal of location work (including word that Iceland and/or Morocco are under consideration as shooting locations for the East and the lands beyond the Wall) will be done in the intervening months.

We know that on January 7th, the critics of the Television Critics Association will be getting a glimpse of the production through a long panel schedule to feature the executive producers, GRRM, and actors Sean Bean, Peter Dinklage, and Emilia Clarke. Word has it they’ll be getting an exclusive look at the show proper, as well—except a lot of Twitter and blog activity on the night.

And after that? The march towards the April premiere date—we suspect that the actual day will be announced at the TCA Winter Press Tour—with gradually increasing promotion and marketing efforts. The official t-shirts are, to say the least, just a start…

George R.R. Martin will be joining six other “Wild Cards” authors at Page One Books in Albuquerque tomorrow, at 3:30PM, for a book signing event after Tor reissued the first Wild Cards novel, Wild Cards I. The reissue contains three brand-new stories by Carrie Vaughn, Michael Cassutt, and David Levine, and a brand-new cover by Michael Komarck.

Another post from Bryan Cogman has gone live at Making Game of Thrones, and this time we’re at Manikata in Malta where the Lhazreen village scenes were filmed a number of weeks ago.

In the post, Cogman discusses a scene being filmed there, where the Dothraki are looting. Most notably, the scene is “almost entirely” spoken in Dothraki, a language created for the show based on what George R.R. Martin has written. The scene features Drogo admonishing an insubordinate warrior in no uncertain terms. Bryan signs off with the following lengthy example of Dothraki: “Eyél várthasoe she ilekaán ríkhoya arrekaán vékha vósi yeroón vósma tolórro!” We’re guessing the last word is the same as in Vaes Tolorro, where Tolorro means bones.

As part of the fifth anniversary of their site, the Tower of the Hand has polled its community of users to determine a list of the top 30 favorite characters, and each day features a profile for one of these characters as they count their way down to the most popular character of them all. Today, they’ve presented the #8 character in their poll, Davos Seaworth, with a profile written by yours truly.

I was quite honored to be invited to participate in this. Congratulations to Johnny, Alex, and the rest of the Tower of the Hand crew!

For three hours on January 7th, HBO will be presenting its programming to critics at the Television Critics’ Association Winter Press Tour. Past TCA events have produced a bounty of information concerning Game of Thrones—from remarks on why HBO greenlit it to the Spring 2011 scheduling—and with the premiere of the show coming before the next TCA press tour (in the Summer), this seems like it’s going to be the point in time when HBO will really focus on the production.

A number of the critics present will certainly be live-blogging and live-tweeting the event, and we’ll be staying up to collate all the major news. The event will be running from 3:15 to 6:15 PM, and we won’t be surprised if a good twenty or thirty minutes of that is exclusively about the production. Maybe even longer, if it so happens that the critics are screened the first episode, which we know has gone through final edit, Presentation participants are tentatively set (but subject to change), as well: executive producers David Benioff and D.B. Weiss, actors Sean Bean, Peter Dinklage, and Emilia Clarke, and a certain George R.R. Martin.

Many thanks to Jace Lacob of Televisionary for providing the date and time information of the TCA panel.

Real life and hardware problems made it take longer than I wanted, but we’ve now fully commented the 142 images we’ve captured from the full version of HBO’s “Inside Game of Thrones” promo. Additional scenes not shown on the web include Tyrion and Jon conversing about why the Imp reads so much, the discovery of the dead direwolf and her pups, and some dialogue between Dany and Jorah Mormont.

To visit the gallery, go to the Previews section of Gallery, or you can start moving sequentially from the images beginning with this.

As I said on Twitter, cue Queen’s “We Are the Champions”:

HBO surprised us when they tweeted that the official store had, for a limited time only, official Game of Thrones t-shirts available on sale. Quite the surprise—pretty sure it’s not common for them to release merchandise for a show that hasn’t yet aired! Currently, only men’s shirts are available.

Another pleasant surprise is the fact that they’ve copies of all four of GRRM’s A Song of Ice and Fire novels available as well. Very cool.

Myles McNutt of Cultural Learnings, a commentator on the media and television critic, shares a thoughtful analysis of how HBO is marketing itself and Game of Thrones in light of last night’s Inside Game of Thrones explosion of fan joy.

It’s a thought provoking piece, providing a perspective that few regular viewers are likely to think about.

(And yes, we’re still screencapping. Not even half way through!)

I’ll have to call it a (very brief) day and leave off screencapping—I’ve now gone 24 hours without sleep! However, I’m about a quarter of the way done through the images we’ve collected, and they’re all commented. If you’d like to see them (and add your own comments), please go here, starting with this image.

Still over a hundred images to annotate. Amazing amounts of visual detail, and some things which I think I can now talk about from my Belfast visit because they’ve been revealed here.

Here’s the streamable video, provided by HBO over at Making Game of Thrones:

Much as we suspected, this 10 minute piece featured both some new footage and a lot of what would be considered recap for dyed-in-the-wool fans. However, this gave us plenty of opportunity to hear from the producers and actors (including some we haven’t yet glimpsed with the production, such as Joe Dempsie, who plays Gendry), and to see copius amounts of new footage. It’s hard to believe that we’re now looking at the wrap of filming in two weeks, and the first airing little more than four or so months away!

We’ll be posting our screen caps and commentary as soon as we can, though we doubt we’ll be able to finish it tonight (remember, we’re in Europe!) That said, we should soon have a few pieces up in the Previews section of Westeros’s Game of Thrones Gallery.

HBO‘s “Inside Game of Thrones” program will be airing tonight, starting at 8:45PM EST, just before the season finale of Boardwalk Empire. The 15-minute period will feature a few minutes of general promotion for HBO’s programming, apparently, but around 10 minutes are specifically a feature focused on Game of Thrones. What can we expect to see? We’re not sure, but our guess is that this will be an introduction to the story and the characters for the wider subscriber audience, with the intention of intriguing them. Our understanding is that any clips from the show will come from the first five episodes (running right through the Hand’s tourney), but there’s plenty of scenes we’ve yet to get a glimpse at. There’s also a hope we’ll be introduced to and get a better look at some of the actors who’ve not yet been very featured: Rory McCann as the Hound, Michelle Fairley as Catelyn Stark, Aidan Gillen as Littlefinger, and so on.

HBO has promised that the video clip will go on-line right after it airs, on the production website Making Game of Thrones. Naturally, we’ll have it linked over at Westeros as soon as the video is available, and then we’ll indulge in watching it and commenting it. Whether we’ll be able to screencap it thoroughly or not…. we’re not sure. Possibly not, given that a 10 minute program is likely to add a hundred or more images to our already extensive Gallery, and as we’re in Europe it’ll be quite late before we can even get started.

Noted humorist and actor John Hodgman—perhaps best known for his role as the “PC in Apple’s famous “Get a Mac” series of commercials—is interviewed on a wide range of topics by Ken Plume. A wide range of topics are discussed, but notably among them is Hodgman taking time out (approximately 15 minutes of the total interview) to discuss the series and his views on the topic of creative endeavors. Hodgman has previously praised the series—of which he’s read the first three—and George has reciprocated the kudos.

We suggested to Mr. Plume that he should invite GRRM to his interview series once he’s read A Game of Thrones (which Hodgman’s praise has led him to pick up), but I think it’d be entertaining to have GRRM and Hodgman both on at the same time, sharing their experiences as writers, creative media talents, and creators in general. With maybe a dash of football on the side, as Hodgman—like George—is a professed fan of the NY Jets. It’d be an entertaining, insightful hour, we suspect.

Make sure to poke around Fred, Plume’s site, for his many other interviews, as he’s very skilled in getting a conversation going.

... or the actress playing her, in any case. Kate Dickie is profiled in the Guardian. There’s quite a lot of information about her life, how she came to become an actress, and some suggestions about the sort of roles she’s best known for, such as her Scottish BAFTA winning role in Red Road. At the very end, HBO’s Game of Thrones is mentioned: