Game of Thrones season 8 will have “the biggest battle in TV history”

Natalia Lee must have a good time when anyone asks her what she does. “Oh, I make armor and weapons for Game of Thrones.” It sure beats “I’m a loan officer.” (With apologies to the hard-working loan officers out there.)

For years now, Lee has been working with her team to arm our favorite characters, and you gotta admit that the gig sounds pretty cool. “There’ll be people in there fletching arrows, making bows, building siege weapons,” she tells CNET. “We may bring in carpenters to help us make large catapults and trebuchets. We have a bowyer who’s a specialty bow maker. We’ve got model makers that specialise just in safety components. It’s like a museum archive now. We’ve accrued a lot of weapons of dead characters.” See? I didn’t even know that “bowyer” was a word.

After that, it’s off to far-flung regions of the world (“in a muddy bog somewhere in Ireland or a desert in Morocco or glaciers in Iceland”) to help actors and directors use the weapons properly. “There’s many days and nights I’ve spent on my truck having to fix things and repaint things and do all sorts of things out in the field.”

Okay, so not everything about the job is ideal. On the whole, though…

It all starts at the beginning, when Lee has to dream up a new weapon or piece of armor based on a description from the producers. “I’ll do my hand sketching and marker rendering because I just really want to work on paper,” she said, “and then ideally work with it in the workshop drawing right there next to a blade, next to a crossguard, a hilt and pommel.” There’s a lot of research that goes into it, too.

"Heartsbane is probably a pretty good example, the sword for the house of Tarly. I referenced hunting rifles and Biblical Renaissance paintings for that epic look. That was two weeks just in research and putting together sketches, research into things like hunted animals. I ran an arrow the full length from the pommel to the crossguard incorporating all those sigils and archers maiming animals. Putting all that detail in, I knew exactly our tolerances for the crossguard."

But doing research and making sketches is one thing. Next comes the actual forging of the weapons.

“In the older days obviously there were lots of different procedures for bladesmithing and forging weaponsm,” Lee recalled. “If we’re doing a close-up, then we’ll get a steel blade that’s nicely pattern-welded. But that’s only for close-ups — we can’t really use those because they could chop heads off. So we use a lot of modern technology. We’ll do a lot of fancy machining: CNC [computer-numerical control] machining, laser-cutting, bronze casting.”

"Realistically, a lot of that stuff can now be cut out and we can go directly to 3D printing. That might not allow us to have the finish that we want, in bronze or in steel, but will do safety variants in rubber. And different stunt teams want different things. Chinese or Hong Kong stunt teams work with bamboo blades because they bounce off faster, or another team works with aluminium blades to get that clang.”"

That sounds like a lot of effort. In there any reason why doesn’t Game of Thrones doesn’t simple things up by using CGI weapons? “Viewers are pretty savvy, we can see what is CGI and what isn’t, so we try to do most of it realistically,” Lee explains. “CG is more about replication. We couldn’t physically make 50 or 20 of those siege weapons. Same with the soldiers: we may work with maximum maybe 400, but you’re replicating them to look like 10,000 or 100,000.” I think we’re all thankful that Lee and her team go practical.

Of course, because Lee makes actual weapons that really work (including Qyburn’s dragon-killing scorpion), safety precautions have to be taken to make sure no stunt performers…y’know, die. Lee and her team make variations of the weapons for use in certain shots. “When we’ve got 400 soldiers in the background we’ll put a lot of safety versions in there. If we have a stuntman being hit by a war hammer 20 times for 20 takes, we might get a super-soft one.”

"What we call the “hero” or the principal, close-up version, will be under close guard so you can’t even get a paper cut. We just lock them up in cases and then we have all the different variations. One character, if they’re gonna fight a lot they could have 20 different variations. For extreme close-ups we have to just switch in and out, so that’s when my job gets harder on the set, especially in action sequences."

Finally, the directors of photography have to pay close attention to the monitor to make sure everything looks believable. “And maybe even CGI comes in sometimes, for a really specific scene, if we just could not physically make it work safely with the real thing.” Put it all together and you get something like this:

Good stuff.

Lee also talked a little about season 8, although she predictably didn’t give too much away. “Someone’s gonna die, and it’s always gonna be our weapons that do it.”

"There’s always cool weapons and swords. I can’t really say much. It’s gonna be the biggest battle in TV history, I can definitely say that. It’s just getting bigger and badder."

Given everything we’ve seen of what’s happening behind the scenes, we can believe that.

Next: Matt Shakman explains how being a director on Game of Thrones is like summer camp

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