George R.R. Martin’s offical site has been updated with a brief post on his “Not a Blog”. He made it home safely late Sunday night, though not soundly: he came down with a case of food poisoning after eating a meal at the airport, and has only now felt strong enough to turn on his computer. He hopes to write more about his trip later on. His appearances page has also been updated, noting that his next scheduled appearance is in May at LepreCon 36 in Mesa, Arizona.
While we’re all waiting the long months ahead to HBO’s expected decision in March, there’s not much fans of the series and the potential TV show can do but keep their eyes out for news. Maybe you’ll read some of GRRM’s latest works. Or perhaps you’ll want to read more about what goes into a production like Game of Thrones. We’re doing a bit of the latter ourselves, and came across a mention of Robert Stromberg in
Matte Painting (UK, US), part of the D’Artiste Digital Artists Master Class series.
Stromberg’s referred to as a mentor to another matte artist, having helped him understand that he needed to restrain his approach to painting. The book is filled with beautiful images from matte paintings throughout, and contains an amazing amount of detail regarding the technical aspects of creating matte paintings and integrating them into films. Makes for fascinating reading if you’re interested in the production side of film and television, and more so because it seems highly likely that matte paintings will be an important part of the production.
Following our dipping our toes into the water of social media over on Twitter, we now have a presence on Facebook’s Pages: Westeros. Become a fan and keep on top of the latest news on George R.R. Martin’s work, A Song of Ice and Fire, and HBO’s Game of Thrones adaption!
Fans of GRRM or superheroes, mark your calendars: Busted Flush will be published in paperback come December 1st, while the final novel in the trilogy Suicide Kings is set for a December 22nd hardcover release.
Busted Flush is the second installment in George R.R. Martin’s and the Wild Card Consortium’s newest Wild Cards trilogy, which started with Inside Straight, and continues introducing readers to a new generation of aces gifted with superpowers by the 60-odd year old Wild Cards virus. The Wild Cards series is the most successful and longest-running shared world around, an amazing feat when so many other shared worlds (which were a fad in the 80’s) fell by the wayside. They’re excellent fun, and jumping on board with this trilogy is a great way to start.
The publisher, TOR, seems quite pleased with the popularity of the series: they’ve purchased a fourth, standalone novel which GRRM announced in May. Titled Fort Freak, the novel will feature one of the enduring creations of the setting, Jokertown, and introduces some great new talents to the setting such as John W. Campbell Award-winner David Anthony Durham
Thanks to etacar11, we’ve read this column at the Washington Post which name-checks A Game of Thrones in the course of advising parents not to worry if their teenagers are voracious readers of fantasy.As the article notes, the fact that these students are reading with any kind of gusto is a great thing, and attempting to force them to enjoy “serious literature” such as Moby Dick or Silas Marner at too young an an age is really, truly, likely to lead to “readicide”.
We’ve put together an informative and speculative article on the visual effects for HBO’s Game of Thrones pilot. This follows our previous feature article, an introduction for fans and casual onlookers alike. Whatever you do, make sure to watch the John Adams featurette to get an idea of just how impressive visual effects can be on the small screen these days.
Filming on the Game of Thrones pilot has wrapped, according to VFX producer Julia Frey. So ends three weeks of shooting that took place in three different countries and involved a primary cast two dozen strong and more than a hundred extras. Cogratulations to the hard-working cast and crew, who pulled a number of all-nighters to get the job done!
Where to next? As we reported early last month, Modern VideoFilm will be carrying out some sort of post-production duties in February, with HBO expected to give its decision on a greenlight in around March. In the interim, we’ve really no idea what will be going on, though we hope to learn more soon.
Bryant Griffin of Airlock Alpha, a media site covering genre works, writes a commentary on HBO’s proposed Game of Thrones series. It’s a great adjunct to articles such as our own introduction to the project, as Griffin covers similar ground but provides a bit more comparison to HBO’s past offerings (such as Deadwood) to make it apparent why Game of Thrones is simply a terrific fit for HBO’s storied original programming.
In the wake of AMC’s The Prisoner miniseries and the premiere of Twilight: New Moon, Jamie Campbell Bower has been interviewed by Movieline. It’s a nice feature, and the second page of the article features a number of questions concerning HBO’s Game of Thrones pilot. One of the most notable pieces of this interview is when he says the following:
“It was a great experience. Very short shoot, but they threw a lot of money at it. Hopefully it’s going to be really good, and hopefully it’ll be greenlit and we’ll go ahead with it. It was great fun and a very strong, rich cast.”
The production is in its final days, by the sounds of it. Last night was a long night shoot, according to a tweet from VFX producer Julia Frey, and it seems from another tweet this evening that there’s another night shoot. We know the scenes shot last night were for the wedding of Daenerys and Drogo. Given the large number of extras likely involved in the elaborate wedding sequence, it seems probable that more filming is being done of that scene.
We’ve written up our first article discussing HBO’s proposed Game of Thrones series. The article includes a rough timeline of development and when we can expect news on whether it’ll go to series, a look at the buzz surrounding the show in both fan and professional circles, some background on the author George R.R. Martin, and a discussion of what sets A Song of Ice and Fire apart from its predecessors in the epic fantasy genre.
We hope it’ll be useful for those who are curious about the proposed series and the books it’s based on, and perhaps as a quick cheat sheet for those who want to write about the buzz without digging through hundreds of posts and tweets across the Net. If there’s any comments or suggestions, please feel free to comment here, our Twitter page, or email us at .(JavaScript must be enabled to view this email address)!
GRRM has posted an update from Morocco. So far, he has watched the filming of the scene where Dany and Drogo first meet, a small part of Kingdom of Heaven’s Jerusalem set in Ourazazate (an image of the set can be foundhere) having been repainted and redressed to serve as part of Illyrio’s courtyard. Tonight, Dany and Drogo’s wedding will be filmed.
GRRM also shares some of his impressions of Morocco in his post, citing the many old film sets scattering the desert, despite struggling with an Arabic keyboard.
An interesting article on a Jennifer Ehle fan blog notes that she’s leapt straight from Game of Thrones to a new film, The King’s Speech, with a star-studded cast including Geoffrey Rush, Colin Firth, and Helena Bonham Carter. Notably, the article the blog sources noted that Ehle missed the readthrough with the rest of the cast because she was still filming Game of Thrones, where she plays Catelyn Stark.
Jane Johnson, head of the Harper Collins Voyager imprint in the U.K., had a chance to chat with GRRM while he was in London. Not only does Voyager publish the A Song of Ice and Fire series, they’re also publishing the recently-released Songs of the Dying Earth. In the course of her notes on the discussion, she touches on the HBO series, but she also wraps up by noting that the most exciting news is that GRRM seems confident he’ll be able to finish A Dance with Dragons quite soon. Has the break and watching the filming fanned the flames and given him an idea for how to finally slice that Meereenese knot?
Valyrian Steel notes that the earliest shipping date for their replica of Arya’s sword, Needle, is too close for comfort to Christmas. They advise those who’ve ordered it that those who place their orders in the U.S. should do so by the 17th to 22nd (depending on shipping options and their geographic location) to get it by New Year, and that those overseas should order a week earlier than that.