“Game of Thrones: A Day in the Life” Offers Insights and Clues

Game of Thrones fans are in for a big treat when they manage to watch the half hour special, A Day in the Life. We get a special behind the scenes look at the globe spanning production that gets mounted in 3 to 5 different shooting locations all within 24 hours.

It’s quite a grand enterprise. The show manages to cover quite a breadth of aspects of Game of Thrones as it prepares for its fifth season of shooting. The major locations are Northern Ireland including Belfast and countryside locales, Croatia including Dubrovnik and the Real Alcázar castle in Sevilla Spain which will be the real life set of the water gardens of Sunspeare in Dorne.

Even in exploring the logistical side of the production, A Day in the Life takes a very personal look. We follow the unit directors, line producers and executive producers in each location as they tackle the unique problems that each scene and each location presents.

In Dubrovnik, the streets are so narrow that no vehicles can be used to carry equipment to and from the set, so the crew must carry it and assemble it all by hand.

When actors like Emilia Clarke switch shooting locations for their scenes, the makeup department have to keep photo records of their work so the look for the characters can stay consistent.

The Real Alcázar is quite the tourist attraction and national monument in Spain, so keeping the place just as they find it and still getting all the shots they need is a work of man power and diplomacy.

Of course, the most exciting part is seeing what we can glean about what’s in store for our beloved world and characters.

Here are a few things for us to mull over. We get a glimpse of a scene between Cersei and The High Sparrow, the religious populist figure dealing with the destitution of the commoners in Kings Landing and elsewhere.

We have it from the word of mouth of the producers that the sprawling fighting pit we saw in the trailer is Daznak’s Pit.

SPOILERS!

The producers talked about the great effort for the 12-day shoot of that scene and now we know why. Drogon is going to make one hell of a bloody rescue judging by how many Sons of the Harpy were cornering Daenerys.

We also learned that the lakeside village we saw in the trailer is in fact Hardhome, and like I recently reasoned, it will indeed see Wildlings trying to stage a migration south by way of Water. In Dance With Dragons, Jon Snow sends several Night’s Watch ships to help the Wildlings, but it doesn’t go well. The books haven’t gotten that far with this plot thread so we don’t know what the end result will be. However, we see previews of scenes with Jon Snow fighting at Hardhome. It seems to me that the Show may expand this storyline for Season 5, similarly to how it expanded the Watch Traitors at Craster’s Keep in Season 4.

NO MORE SPOILERS!

Elsewhere in the production, Lena Headey (Cersei) and Ian Beattie (Meryn Trant) prove that when the cameras aren’t rolling, they’re both jokers. Emillia Clarke wears a big blue net over her hair from makeup to the set. It’s quite a compliment to the show’s presentation that, no matter how much I see of the actors outside the show, or how deeply we get a look at the production I’m always entirely transported and entirely invested in the story and characters when the show is on.

By the time the 26 minutes elapsed and the recap of that 24 hours in the different locations was over, I was struck by just how much goes on in the production in just a single day of filming. And yet, also how very little that one day of effort represents in the entire production schedule over the course of the season.

I know we the fans show our appreciation!

The special ended with this figure run down.

This season Game of Thrones has shot in 5 countries, on 151 sets, for 240 days, and has 166 cast members, 5000 extras with 1000 crew members and shows in 193 countries.

Kind of sums it up, doesn’t it?

You can watch Game of Thrones Season 5: A Day in the Life below!