Season 7 promotion timeline

Bored from waiting for the first season 7 trailer? Here's a quick overview about the promo stuff we got before season 6 premiere to have some orientation about the possible timeline:

Up to now, we got the same stuff roughly in the same order and period of time as we did last year:
a teaser poster, two teaser videos and a bunch of promo pictures. If they follow a similar pattern as last season, next in line we could see

• another teaser (next week?) 
• the official season 7 poster 
• maybe some "Inside GoT" / "Behind the scenes" clip 
• the first trailer (around May 31st / June 1st?)

But maybe we'll get even more stuff this year - to lighten our long dark night of waiting!

(Or less - to punish us for the leaks ;-) )

First official season 7 promo pictures released

Yesterday HBO finally released the first bunch of official promotion pictures showing "real" content from the episodes.

Here's what we know about those pictures:

	Shooting Date: Aug 31, 2016 Location: Belfast Episode: Probably E01 Context: Cersei and Jaime in the Throne Room. Jaime has Widow's Wail, the Valyrian steel sword formerly owned by Joffrey.
	Shooting Date: Sep 13, 2016 Location: Shane's Castle Episode: E01 or E02 Context: Jon Snow standing in the crypts of Winterfell.
	Shooting Date: Sep 24, 2016 Location: Linen Mill Studios Episode: E01 Context: Lyanna Mormont, Littlefinger and Northern lords in Winterfell, discussing how to deal with those who betrayed the Starks.
	Shooting Date: Sep 24, 2016 Location: Linen Mill Studios Episode: E01 Context: Davos in Winterfell during the discussion on the fate of those who betrayed the Starks.
	Shooting Date: Sep 28, 2016 Location: Northern Ireland Episode: E01-E05 Context: Sam studying and Gilly practising her reading skills in Oldtown. The text in her book is a passage from "The World of Ice and Fire".
	Shooting Date: Sep 29, 2016 Location: Northern Ireland Episode: ??? Context: Daenerys in the Throne Room of Dragonstone.
	Shooting Date: Sep 30, 2016 Location: Northern Ireland Episode: ??? Context: Varys in the Throne Room of Dragonstone.
	Shooting Date: Oct 5, 2016 Location: Magheramorne Episode: E01 Context: Meera pulling Bran on a new sled towards the Wall.
	Shooting Date: Oct 21, 2016 Location: San Juan de Gaztelugatxe Episode: ??? Context: Missandei in Dragonstone, wearing a dragon brooch.
	Shooting Date: Oct 24, 2016 Location: Moneyglass Episode: ??? Description: Tormund and Brienne in Winterfell
	Shooting Date: Oct 24, 2016 Location: Moneyglass Episode: ??? Description: Littlefinger and Sansa in Winterfell
	Shooting Date: Oct 25, 2016 Location: Mourne Mountains Episode: E01 Context: The Hound with several other riders (probably from the Brotherhood without Banners) on their way North.
	Shooting Date: Oct 28, 2016 Location: Zumaia Episode: E01 Context: Team Daenerys after their landing in Dragonstone. Grey Worm is wearing a dragon brooch.
	Shooting Date: Oct 28, 2016 Location: Zumaia Episode: E01 Context: Tyrion after the landing in Dragonstone
	Shooting Date: ??? Location: ??? Episode: E01-E03 Context: Arya in a tavern, probably the Inn at the Crossroads. In front of her seems to be a tablet with bakery wares or other food.

GoT Season 7 Episode Guide

Shooting for Game of Thrones season 7 has finished, and now long months of waiting lie ahead until the first episode will finally air.

Time for a résumé and something to shorten the idle time: a visual GoT Season 7 Episode Guide.

GoT season 7 was filmed for 6 long months in at least 24 locations in 5 countries. We had

• lots of on-set photos and videos by journalists, paparazzi, and fans, especially from Spain; 
• as usual, many hints and leaks brought to us by Watchers on the Wall, Los Siete Reinos and other fansites and individual fans; 
• plus, big parts of the season 7 storyline were leaked back in September / October 2016 by reddit user u/awayforthelads and confirmed numerous times since then (as you can judge by yourself when flipping through these pages). 

 
So, I tried to put all of this together to give a comprehensive visual overview about what to expect in season 7. This of course is totally a work-in-progress, and there surely will be more stories and details than those included in this guide - but this is what we know of right now.

NOTE regarding the leaks: Later, there were several other "leakers" who claimed to have inside information. But as all of them were much less credible imo, I only included leaks by u/awayforthelads into this overview. Information delivered by u/awayforthelads himself is marked green, second hand information (PMs supposedly from u/awayforthelads published by other users) is marked red to make it easier to distinguish them by level of authenticity.

EDIT 2017-05-25: As the first official trailer proved several of u/awayfortheladspart2's leaks true, and him being identical with the original Lads can now safely be assumed, I added u/awayfortheladspart2's information and marked it yellow.

EDIT 2017-06-22: As the second official trailer showed us a flock of ravens controlled by Bran, 
I added the October 2016 leaks by an anonymous leaker on 4chan.
 

BEWARE: BIG SPOILERS AHEAD! 

If you want to stay unsullied, do NOT click the following links.


Overview of shooting locations

Episode 1 (Director: Jeremy Podeswa)

Episode 2 (Director: Mark Mylod)

Episode 3 (Director: Mark Mylod)

Episode 4 (Director: Matt Shakman)

Episode 5 (Director: Matt Shakman)

Episode 6 (Director: Alan Taylor)

Episode 7 (Director: Jeremy Podeswa)


And finally, a collections of images, scenes and characters from Season 7 which can right now not clearly be atttributed to a specific episode: Unknown Episodes.

  

How to film a wight polar bear?

So in the leaks we heard that there will be a fight not only with lots of conventional wights north of the wall, but also with a wight polar bear - and that Thoros of Myr will be killed by this beast.

This promises stunning action scenes - but how in seven hells do you film such scenes? Basically, there are two possibilities:

• you either create that bear completely via CGI (like the dragons), or 
• you use a real animal and adapt its look in post production (like the direwolves).

While the first way is quite laborious and expensive, the second one seems to be completely impossible. Polar bears are extremely dangerous and fierce animals and surely can not be trained to act in front of a camera or even work with actors, can they?

Well, the first surprise when researching this topic was this: Remember that scene from season 3 where Brienne has to fight a bear? In fact this was filmed with a real bear, and Gwendoline Christie & the bear did film the scene closely together, only separated by a small electric fence!

So would this theoretically possible with a polar bear? As it seems there is at least one crazy animal trainer who lives and works very closely with his 800+ pound polar bear named Agee:

"Mark Dumas is the only man in the world who can chill out with a polar bear"

This guy not only wrestles and swims with his bear, but they also spend their time together "on the road working on TV and film sets". Agee even has her own IMDb entry, and according to this site she has lots of experience being filmed for movies or commercials.
 
 
To complete the picture: Now guess who worked with Agee in a Norwegian movie from 2014 called Operasjon Arktis? Good old Tormund Giantsbane - he even has a short fight with that bear:

Kristofer Hivju	Kristofer Hivju and Agee

So if D & D were thinking about how to shoot that polar bear scene, they only had to ask Kristofer Hivju about his experiences with Agee. And if they chose to book her, the scenes would probably have to be filmed either in British Columbia, Canada (where the bear lives) or at the west coast of the USA. Transporting the bear to Europe would be both very difficult and illegal, which was the reason why the scenes with Brienne and the bear had to be filmed in a Los Angeles studio.

I doubt we'll get any information on this topic before the season airs - but if Paul Kaye or other actors of the wight hunting team would be sighted in Canada or around LA, that could be a clue.

Until then, we simply have to imagine the head of Thoros of Myr in the picture to the right...

"The Big Tree"

TL;DR: New information seems to confirm that the title "The Big Tree" that we saw on a sheet back in September does not refer to a certain episode, but might be the project title for the upcoming season 7 of Game of Thrones as a whole.

-----


Back in September, in one of the pictures shot by paparazzo PAP4U at the Linen Mill Studios in Corbet we could see a sheet containing supposed information on the shooting:



The Big Tree - Director: Jeremy Podeswa - WOLF CREW
Episodes: 704/7xx or 701/7xx - Saturday, 24th September 

While the numbers of the episodes were hard to read and therefore disputed, most of the information was self-explaining: Director, shooting crew, date.

One thing though was not clear - the title "The Big Tree" at the top of the sheet. First idea was of course that this could be the name of the episode shot that day - but usually episode names are not chosen this early in production. So it might just have been some preliminary working title; but as there are clearly two episodes referenced on that sheet, that didn't sound too convincing neither.

Now, two pieces of information have shown up that might shed some light on "The Big Tree".

First, reddit user u/conordmcmahon posted a couple of answers he claims to have gotten from  reddit leaker u/awayforthelads a while ago. While we can not verify this at all, the information he presented is well aligned with the leaks u/awayforthelads gave us before. In fact, there's not even a lot of new information at all.

But one remark is very interesting because it directly adresses the title "The Big Tree" in said sheet:

"All of the scripts have The Big Tree written at the start. It's not an episode title, it's a project title for this season - think 'Blue Harvest' for Star Wars back in the day. Take it from that - the episodes don't actually have titles yet, Just episode numbers."

Does this make any sense at all? We haven't heard of any project titles or code names for complete GoT seasons before, and it's unclear what the advantage of talking about "The Big Tree" instead of GoT season 7 would be. One idea might be that sheets / scripts with the title "The Big Tree" instead of "Game of Thrones Season 7" on the first page would not attract so much interest from people accidentally seeing them. Other reasons? No idea.

On the other hand, there was an image posted by Twitter user ‏@IpsyGypsy a month ago that immediately came into my mind when reading u/conordmcmahon's post. It shows a name badge belonging to storyboard artist Jane Wu, and it goes very well along with the claim that "The Big Tree" is the project title for this season:


It could be pure coincidence that the picture of Bran arriving at the big weirwood tree in S04E10 was selected as background for the badge of season 7 crew members. But my guess is that this selection rather confirms that "The Big Tree" has importance as a symbol and / or project name for this season.

Plus, it gives me hope that Bran's storyline in S07 will be more important than we know right now... ;-)