If you’ve watched Game of Thrones, you know that getting to know and love a character is their death knell – it doesn’t take long for something senseless and violent to remove your favourite and keep you guessing about what might be happening next. We thought it would be great to shoot a series of images, featuring characters from the show, and featuring Death – just hanging about, biding time until he is inevitably called to action.
Working with actors is a joy – they know where their arms and legs and face and eyes are, and they know how to project emotion and feeling with everything from a stance to a subtle facial change. Natalie, Alex, Brittany, Greg and Scott (with Scott doing double duty as Death) threw themselves in to it, and it totally works!
One of the fun parts of the shoot was building these super-serious, contextually consistent scenes with a dramatic persona in the foreground and a cool location for the background… with Death being just a little ridiculous somewhere in the shot. I can’t quite explain why, but Wanda’s idea for death’s dropped ice cream (above) makes me very happy indeed.
You want to see some magnificent prop work? Wanda Macgyvered some ancient parchment out of some printer paper, coffee, and a sandwich press. Best smelling magic scroll ever!
We had a lot of fun incorporating photographs from our travels. European palaces and North American forests featured pretty heavily in the series. Now, obviously, the budget didn’t quite stretch far enough to fly people overseas… Instead, we shot in our lounge room (much more exotic) and did some composite work to integrate characters in to their locations. So for this one project, we brought together elements we’d shot in Denmark, Colorado, Paris, Oregon, Stockholm, and Brisbane. Here’s a little behind-the-scenes if you’re curious.
Lord of the Thrones premiere performance is on Saturday 12 September at the Metro Arts Theatre, Brisbane. Tickets are available from impromafia.com.
I kind of feel like I got a private performance of their show. My handy assistant (our daughter miss T) and I were treated to these two telling stories, bickering, chastising us and each other, and generally being hilarious. I learned more about the economics of budget biscuit purchases than I thought possible. I wish there was some way to show you how much fun these guys were to shoot, with their antics and wild gesticulation.
