Mance Rayder’s Camp

By Cat Taylor

Photo Credit: Helen SloanSome of you may have read a previous post where I talked about our first meeting with Mance Rayder and how hot his tent became with all the SFX fires and torches burning throughout the day.

Even if we are filming on a Lava field here in Iceland, it’s not hot anymore – the car display indicates the temperature is minus 11 degrees. It’s day five, and all of Mance’s camp, not just the inside of his tent, is laid out before us. The camp is the product of months of work from the art department and weeks of construction by the local crew. It is spectacular.

Walking from base, the edge of the camp is only a few feet away, but the site is like a fantasy. If you can ignore the cameras and crew, you might believe you were actually inside a wilding village. Our extras (the men all with fabulous beards of course) work in between the huts or huddle around fires, and even children run through the snow to greet a visitor from the Wall, in their own special way.

It’s also a day when our friend Ian Whyte, who plays the White Walker, is back in a different role, one we haven’t seen before. He’s got some awfully big shoes to fill for this particular scene.

A few behind-the-scenes moments from today: How about our fantastic SFX boys setting up a grill behind one of the huts at the edge of camp and handing out hotdogs to anyone who wanted them? Or the fact that in the magnificent wide shot up and over the camp there were certain crew who couldn’t clear the shot fast enough after setting a prop, weapon or flame and had to curl up inside the tents, waiting for the cut?

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Arrival in Iceland Marks the Beginning of the End

By Cat Taylor

Photo Credit: Helen SloanThis year’s on-location shoot in Iceland is quite different from last year’s. We are shooting a month earlier and for only eight days, whereas we were in Iceland for nearly a month in 2011. The trip, our first to Iceland, spanned three main locations and many hundreds of miles, with stays in Svinafelljokull, Vatnjokull, Vik and many locations surrounding each base.

For Season 3, we were lucky enough to see another part of Iceland entirely as we are based in the Myvatn Lake region in the North, a few hours from the town of Akureyi.

It was not the most auspicious of starts on our first Monday in Reykjavik – a storm had been coming in from the ocean and all domestic flights were grounded from early in the morning – a worry because all our directors, ADs and producers were scheduled to do a two-day recce of all the locations for the shoot, beginning the next day.

For those of you who aren’t familiar, a recce is a chance for the director, DOP and the crew to reconnoitre the location and finalize the details of how that scene will work – in what direction the camera will shoot, where the actors will walk, where the best light angles will be and so on, down to the best place for base (close, but out of sight and far enough away that the generator can’t be heard, is the ideal).

Finally, at 3 pm in the afternoon we received word that the airport in Akureyi was open and those who needed to fly out raced to the airport – some people were driving and had hit the road hours before – to catch the first plane. After a short flight over the stunning mountains and glaciers, we arrived only slightly windswept at our hotels and practiced in our snow boots again.

We may only be shooting for eight days, but within that we will work with 3 directors/directing teams: Alex Graves, David Benioff and Dan Weiss and Dan Minahan covering scenes from five of the 10 episodes in Season 3. We’ve got a lot to do, and baby, it’s cold outside.

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