HBO’s Making Game of Thrones blog has posted the storyboards for the scene in “Eastwatch” where Jon Snow and Drogon have a close encounter. Check them out below:
It’s always uncanny how close the production shots come to perfectly matching the storyboards. It’s probably a necessity, considering how much CGI is added.
And hey! We get a bonus storyboard from the Game of Thrones Instagram page: the scene where Bran sends ravens to spy on the Night King.
These are great, haunting images unto themselves. HBO could print, frame and sell thousands of these.
Next comes what, in my opinion, may well be one of artist Robert Ball’s most exquisite images in his ‘Beautiful Death’ series. HBO commissions him to create one image per episode, and you can check out every fabulous one of them at the Beautiful Death website.
The “Eastwatch” image is fascinating because Ball chose a less obvious subject to convey the feeling of the episode. According to the Making Game of Thrones production diary, it’s the “Eastwatch beautiful death you may not expect.”
“Each Beautiful Death is, in part, a reaction to the previous one,” Ball says. In the drawing for last week’s “The Spoils of War,” Ball concentrated on the burning Lannister soldiers in the Loot Train Attack, so in “Eastwatch,” he chose to avoid the battlefield and pump up the symbolism surrounding the return of Gendry and his crushing of the Gold Cloaks’ skulls. According to Ball, “The deaths themselves are relatively unimportant — though important to the corrupt guards in question, of course. The scene is really about establishing Gendry’s return and his credentials in the war ahead.”
The image describes Gendry’s journey from ironmonger to fighter. The flames form the antlers of a Baratheon stag; the warhammer transforms from a rowboat oar. In the distance, the icy Wall, with Gendry’s hammer frosting over at the tip. The two hapless soldiers are represented as skulls. The greed that sealed their deaths are coins falling into the furnace from their eyes, representing the way Ser Davos tried to blind them to the truth, and also the custom of resting coins on the eyes of the dead.
Powerful stuff. And there’s two more to come for season 7!
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