HBO sure has been doing a great job of slowly feeding us a growing supply of Game of Thrones goodies as they carefully build hype up to a fever pitch for the season six premiere on April 24. Trailers and official photos are pretty cool, but my favorite content has been coming from their Making Game of Thrones site. It has a bounty of props from past seasons and behind the scenes videos showing just how much work goes into every episode and scene.
The last featurette they released concentrated on the camera teams that film everything. Now, there’s a new video that takes an in-depth look into the extensive prosthetics required to bring all the mystical beings on the show to life (or death). There’s a bunch of them, from White Walkers to Wights to Stone Men to Giants. According to Barrie Gower, lead prosthetic designer, it takes a team of over a dozen workers an average of four weeks to get a single character’s ‘kit’ ready.
And boy does it look like they have a lot of kits to create. The video shows us several large rooms chock full of an endless assortment of faces and limbs. We also get to see the prosthetics in action. One scene shows a large group of White Walkers on the move, which is bad news for the characters on the show and where we’ll have to declare there are SPECULATIVE SEASON SIX SPOILERS AHEAD!!!!
As you can see at 1:20 of the video, we’ve got a large force of White Walkers and wights looking like they’re ready for business. It’s the biggest assembly of undead we’ve witnessed since Hardhome, and this time the Night’s King has brought some sort of ice bone sword thing with him. I doubt you’d want to end up on the business end of that thing.
At 2:30 there’s this shot, which implies to me that the White Walkers are attacking the Weirwood Tree beyond The Wall currently occupied by Bran, Hodor, Meera Reed, and the Three Eyed Raven. Oh, and a bunch of those creepy fireball throwing Children of the Forest. The fact that we’re seeing a White Walker already inside the tree where the root structures are visible doesn’t bode well for our heroes’ ability to defend the area.
But it’s not all doom and gloom. At 0:54 we see this shot of a wight struggling to escape the tree’s roots. Legend has it the Children of the Forest actually become part of the Weirwood Tree when they die. Will the tree itself end up fighting back against the White Walkers?
This is just the latest hint of major happenings about to go down in Game of Thrones season six. Now that the show has run out of book to cover, it seems like they’re putting their foot on the gas and pushing forward aggressively with every plot. Producers David Benioff and D.B. Weiss have said this season may be the best season they’ve done yet. In exactly a month we’ll get to see and judge for ourselves.
