All year, we’ve been hearing that this year’s battle episode, which we know now is called “Battle Of The Bastards”, is the biggest battle in the history of Game Of Thrones, and maybe in the history of television. But just how big, is big? Well, we found out. In an exclusive with Entertainment Weekly, the guys behind Game Of Thrones let them know just how big this weekends episode really is.
600 crew members
Crew can include everything from cameramen to prop masters to costume department.
500 extras
The extras made up the bulk of the Snow and Bolton armies, playing wildlings, archers, swordsmen, spearmen, etc. The armies were trained separately to create a competitve off-screen rivalry that would hopefully then become apparent on camera during the fighting scenes. Visual effects were then used to expand the armies into the thousands.
160 tons of gravel
Heavy rain made the production’s field in Northern Ireland extremely muddy. Horses don’t like mud. So gravel had to be brought in to give the horses some traction. Which leads us to…
70 horses
One of the most difficult aspects of making the battle. You typically only see horses in a war sequence nowadays in a major big-budget Hollywood film as the animals are notoriously difficult to coordinate – and quite expensive. Adding horses typically makes the process of shooting a scene take twice as long.
25 stuntmen and women
Somebody’s gotta fall off those horses and endure Kit Harington’s beatings.
25 shooting days
To get a sense of how long this is, most TV dramas are shot in seven-to-10 days. And that’s for a full episode, whereas Thrones spent 25 days on this battle sequence alone (the sequence isn’t all fighting – there’s some sideline drama as well).
4 camera crews
This one is pretty self explanatory.
$$$ dollars
While they didn’t release the exact number, we have an idea. Game Of Thrones season 6 cost about $10 million per episode, which is considered an average – the price per hour varies and “BOB” is presumably the season’s most expensive episode. So go ahead and guess (and you might even be right).
Yeah, so, based on logistics alone, this is literally already the most epic episode of Game Of Thrones ever made. Hopefully the episode itself can live up the cost and the hype of the production.
[h/t Entertainment Weekly]
