How big is the climactic Jon Snow vs. Ramsay Bolton face-off? This big.
Here’s what it took to pull off the battle sequence in Sunday’s episode, which is directed by Miguel Sapochnik (“Hardhome”):
600 crew members
Crew can include everything from cameramen to prop masters to costume department.
500 extras
The performers filled out the Snow and Bolton armies, playing wildlings, archers, swordsmen, spearmen, etc. The armies were trained separately to create a competitve off-screen rivalry that would hopefully then become apparent on camera during the fighting scenes. Visual effects were then used to expand the armies into the thousands.
160 tons of gravel
Heavy rain made the production’s field in Northern Ireland extremely muddy. Horses don’t like mud. So gravel had to be brought in to give the horses some traction. Which leads us to…
70 horses
One of the most difficult aspects of making the battle. You typically only see horses in a war sequence nowadays in a major big-budget Hollywood film as the animals are notoriously difficult to coordinate – and quite expensive. Adding horses typically makes the process of shooting a scene take twice as long.
25 stuntmen and women
Somebody’s gotta fall off those horses and endure Kit Harington’s beatings.
25 shooting days
To get a sense of how long this is, most TV dramas are shot in 8-to-12 days. And that’s for a full episode, whereas Thrones spent 25 days on this battle sequence alone (the sequence isn’t all fighting – there’s some sideline drama as well).
4 camera crews
This one is pretty self explanatory.
$$$ dollars
How much did this episode cost? We don’t have an exact figure for you. But Thrones season 6 cost north of $10 million per episode and that’s considered very much an average – the price per hour varies and “BOB” is presumably the season’s most expensive episode. So go ahead and guess (and you might even be right).