Along with the release of Game of Thrones Season 1 on DVD and Blu-ray, we’ve got an interview from IGN with the series co-creator and executive producer, D.B. Weiss. He talks about the extras that he knows his fans’ll go crazy for. But what was Weiss most excited about on the Blu-ray set? “There are a lot of great things on in,” Weiss said, “but I would say that the big stand out would probably be the illustrated history of the world that’s laid out in George R. R. Martin’s books, A Song of Ice and Fire, which were beautifully illustrated by William Simpson, who is our storyboard artist on the show and a notable comic book artist in his own right.”
“And we had him team up with our writer Bryan Cogman who wrote some really nice narrative histories of the Seven Kingdoms that the DVD team then semi-animated with actors doing voice-over lines to tie it all together. We enjoyed watching them a great deal and we think the fans will as well.”
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=01ZMYAdra2A
With several scenes being written specifically for the show, fans are wondering if there was going to be a deleted scenes section for what was originally missing from Martin’s text. “Unfortunately no,” Weiss stated. “We really ate what we killed during the first season. We were operating on a very tight timeline for production and so if there was a scene that we felt we didn’t need for the show we tended to just not shoot that scene. And so they all just fell by the wayside. So there aren’t any deleted scenes on the DVD, but there are a ton of other goodies in terms of ‘Making of’ featurettes and lots of commentary tracks to listen to. Just a ton of really interesting commentaries across the board about all the different episodes, from a wide variety from the cast and crew.”
At the Game of Thrones San Diego Comic-Con panel, the producers stated that they really wanted to put Jason Momoa’s (Khal Drogo) audition on the set because he performed a wild, crazy dance routine. It turns out that only some auditions were put on the DVD and were christened hidden “dragon eggs”.
“This is the first show that HBO has ever shot on Digital HD,” Weiss said, “which is something that we were very much behind after seeing probably one of the most expensive, extensive ’35 mm vs. Digital’ tests for the Alexa camera that has ever been done.”
“So we got to see and test what the Alexa could do on Digital,” Weiss went on, “and we ended up going with it because we knew it could survive and that it could withstand the real and true HD. We’ve seen the episodes screened in screening rooms for the crew and we wanted to make sure that in the scenario where you’re actually screening the show for people in theaters that it would hold up and preserve the theatrical experience. And we felt like it did and we were really excited about that. But we definitely shot the show with HD in mind and we based all our visual decisions around that.”