At this past weekend’s New York Comic Con, Sophie Turner (Sansa Stark) talked about some of the security measures HBO took to protect the set of Game of Thrones season 8 from prying eyes. “If a drone flies above sets, there’s a thing that can kill the drones, which is really cool,” she said. “It creates a field around it and the drones just drop. It’s very X-Men.”
That does indeed sound a little sci-fi, but James Hibberd of Entertainment Weekly confirms that such devices were indeed on hand to knock unwelcome drones out of the sky, although it’s unclear if they were actually used. Hibberd, who got to visit the sets during filming, noted that they had signs disallowing drones, planes and helicopters to fly over during shooting. Meanwhile, HBO worked with local authorities to prevent unauthorized photography. It mostly worked, although of course some shots did leak, like this bird’s eye view of the sprawling King’s Landing set at Titanic Studios in Belfast. Click to blow it up — it’s quite detailed.
There are even pictures taken from inside the King’s Landing set, likely by a crew member, because I don’t care how many security measures HBO puts in place; fandom will find a way.
That said, the drone killer technology sounds pretty cool. According to The Los Angeles Times, a drone killer is “an electronic device that can disable a drone in the sky and force it back to the ground… can be aimed like a rifle or a shotgun at a drone in the air. The 30-degree field of its beam and its range of almost half a mile make the target hard to miss.”
Very X-Men indeed.
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That said, drone killers aren’t nearly as cool as what security company GS4 once contemplated using on the set of Thrones: eagles trained to take down drones. Roll the tape:
Ah, what could have been.
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