Westeros

This feels long over-due: HBO announces an after-show for season 6 of Game of Thrones, titled After the Thrones, which will feature critic and commentator Andy Greenwald (formerly of Grantland) and Chris Ryan of Grantland-succesor, The Ringer. See the press release below:

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.

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.

There’s a brand new Game of Thrones video over at Making Game of Thrones, the official production blog for the show. Perhaps it’s because of the subject matter, but this struck me as one of the most visually beautiful of HBO’s behind-the-scenes videos looking into season 6. Also, while it’s not a trailer, it actually features a handful of pretty noteworthy details that we’ll discuss briefly below the video:

Thanks to HBO, we’re able to provide an exclusive look at one of the new Histories and Lore that will be included in the Game of Thrones Season 5 Bluray set. Listen and watch below as Ian McElhinney—the late, lamented Ser Barristan Selmy—recounts the events of Robert’s Rebellion from their nascent beginnings to their bloody end:

We’re also very happy to be able to provide the full listing of the Histories and Lore, along with all the narrators for each segment. See that below:

Here’s an interesting scoop from Entertaintment Weekly: Finn Jones, best known to Game of Thrones fans as Ser Loras Tyrell, has landed the lead role in the Marvel-Netflix series, Iron Fist. The role of Danny Rand has had a lot of debate surrounding it in various corners of the media, but it looks like the studio has pushed back against that.

For those who don’t know, the character of Iron Fist was created in the 1970s when there was a fad for martial arts in pop culture—Bruce Lee, Kung-Fu, and the like—and Marvel dutifully looked to provide what people wanted. In the comics, Iron Fist is Danny Rand, an American who ends up becoming the pupil of a mystical martial artist in the hidden city of K’un-L’un. There he learned martial arts and gained supernatural powers by placing his fists in the heart of a dragon. Born to a wealthy family, Rand is a businessman by day, hero by night, who has long associations with Luke Cage (recently seen in Jessica Jones, and soon appearing in his own series) and other heroes such as Daredevil (notably, the first season of Daredevil featured easter eggs pointing to K’un-L’un and Iron Fist), the heroic group The Defenders (the ultimate goal of Netflix being a series featuring this group), the Avengers, and more.

Almost a year ago, George R.R. Martin revealed in an Entertainment Weekly interview that he was contemplating a twist to the story of a character—and a group of characters connected with them—that he had never contemplated before and which, more notably, was something HBO’s Game of Thrones could not do because of choices the show had made that precluded it:

The fandom was abuzz with it—it sparked several threads on our forum, for one—as people puzzled over who it might be. As I recall, at the time speculation was centering on Sansa Stark because of signs that the show was going to diverge heavily from her storyline in A Song of Ice and Fire (as it indeed did). However, a brand new interview with George from IGN revisits the topic and reveals some significant new information:

We’d be remiss not to note that the popularity of the Wild Cards series of superhero stories has continued unabated, so much so that Random House Audio has signed on to continue the release of audio books of the original series of shared-world anthologies that started it all. As reported by George R.R. Martin at his “Not a Blog”, Random House started with the third volume, Jokers Wild, after the first two volumes had been released earlier by Brilliance Audio.

Random House’s first entry features a pretty noteworthy cast of readers: Pam Grier (Jackie Brown, Smallville, Felicia Day (Buffy the Vampire Slayer, The Guild), and Ron Donachie (Game of Thrones) are among the contributors.

More recently, George has noted that Aces Abroad —the fourth volume in the series, expanded with two newer stories—has just finished recording, and it has an even larger cast including Selma Blair (Hellboy), Adrian Paul (Highlander), and Armin Shimmerman (Buffy the Vampire Slayer, Star Trek: Deep Space 9). Shimmerman will be reading the parts of the joker Xavier Desmond, and as it happens Aces Abroad is best known for George’s interstitial “From the Journal of Xavier Desmond”. This should be quite good! Next to get the audio treatment will be the fifth book, Down & Dirty.

In related news, GRRM has shared that the latest book in the new Wild Cards series, High Stakes, will be published in hardcover by Tor on August 23rd. George has also pointed to the latest Humble Book Bundle for fans interested in getting two of the more difficult to acquire Wild Cards novels, Deuces Down and Death Draws Five, as well as other works by the likes of the great SF writers Alfred Bester (a personal favorite of mine), Arthur C. Clarke, Isaac Asimov, and Roger Zelazny. The Humble Bundle uses a “pay what you want” model, though certain levels are required to get certain works. Best of all, those who pay can decide how to divide up their contribution between the publisher, the Humble Bundle group, and a selection of three worthy charities.

Colony, a new science fiction series that premiered on the USA Network last month, is going to recieve a special screening of two episodes at George R.R. Martin’s Jean Cocteau Cinema in Santa Fe, New Mexico. Following the two episodes, the co-creator of the series Ryan Condal will be taking the stage with George R.R. Martin himself for a Q&A that will be moderated by IGN’s entertainment editor Terri Schwartz.

All well and good—this should be a great experience for those who manage to get into the screening! But for those of us not so lucky, it happens that IGN shall be broadcasting the Q&A tonight at 1930 Pacific / 2230 Eastern / 0330 GMT (Friday) via their Periscope Channel. Schwartz has put out a call for questions to GRRM and Condal regarding science fiction and fantasy, Colony, and of course A Song of Ice and Fire and Game of Thrones:

As we speculated with the release of new images from Season 6 of Game of Thrones, it looks like this Sunday HBO will air a new teaser for the season at 8:59PM, just prior to the premiere of Vinyl. There seems to be a very short extract from the teaser in the tweet announcing this:

HBO has released 20 brand new images from the forthcoming season 6, featuring a number of the key actors in the series, as well as one new-ish addition in the form of the legendary Max von Sydow in the role of the “Three-Eyed Raven”. While we’re working on getting them into our gallery, you can find them all at the official Making Game of Thrones website.

Here’s a sample of the images:

Given that HBO’s new big series, Martin Scorsese’s and Mick Jagger’s Vinyl, is premiering this Sunday, this photo release does make it feel as if the first official season 6 trailer for Game of Thrones could well be making an appearance this weekend.

Game of Thrones, season 6 premieres April 24th.