Game of Thrones crew talks about the filming of ‘Battle of The Bastards’

After the epic end of Game of Thrones, we’ve been left with a lasting impact because of the amazing direction of the finale episode and also episode 9 of season 6. Game of Thrones season 6 episode 9 ‘Battle of the Bastards‘ was one of the best episodes on television, and it left a lot of fans wondering how such an epic episode was created by the cast and crew of the show. The episode has also been nominated at the Emmys for a number of categories including direction, writing, sound mixing, visual effects etc. Director Miguel Sapochnik and his hundreds of crew members created an episode so brilliant that we couldn’t wait to know how it was made in the first place.

In an interview with LA Times, some of the crew members revealed how it was to film episode 9 of season 6. “We wanted to shoot a battle on a TV show that films would be referencing and trying to emulate,” said Emmy-nominated stunt coordinator Rowley Irlam. “That was our goal. To create something on an epic, cinematic scale that would stand up to anything shot on film.”

He spoke of how Miguel Sapochnik drew up the creativity and brought everyone on the crew together to film the episode.

“Miguel was the driving force behind the creativity, and together with VFX, we all sat down in a big melting pot to throw out ideas that complemented each other,” he continued. “What we were trying to accomplish with Jon Snow’s [Kit Harington] journey, even though he’s a skilled fighter, was to make you feel that any random event could possibly remove our hero from the game at any second.”

The most interesting moment of the episode in the initial part happened when Jon Snow was about to be attacked by a hundred horses running towards him until he was effectively saved by his cavalry. Joe Bauer, the visual effects supervisor said, “All those horses you see galloping toward Snow are real. When the more violent actions take place we laid out ahead of time where the real horses would go and where the gaps would be. We then would populate those spaces with CG horses for the hard falls and impacts you clearly couldn’t do without killing a person or a horse.”

Sound mixer Ronan Hill then spoke about the amazing sound effects of the episode. He said, “For me, it’s never enough to just record the dialogue. We try to record stereo effects in addition to a mono boom where possible, to get a real sense of drama. We even fitted mics to cameras on tracking crane arms and placed wireless mics on the horses to get clean horse hoof effects for the charge into battle.”

We now know how much effort went into the creation of such a great episode, and we surely hope the show grabs more Emmys this year than expected!

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