Outlander season 6 is finally in production!

Rejoice, Outlander fans! We canna contain our excitement over the fact that the sixth season of the show is OFFICIALLY in production. The Droughtlander is one day closer to ending, and despite this hiatus being far from over, we will take anything we can get.

The official Outlander Twitter account tweeted out a minute-long video giving fans a behind-the-scenes look at the sets, props and costumes. We even get a glimpse of the director announcing the first take, reassuring us all that Outlander season 6 is no longer a pipe dream.

Cast members including Sam Heughan also tweeted their excitement, despite the very real threat of the pandemic still lurking and a brewing snowstorm in Scotland. Nothing is going to stop these guys from getting back to work!

Why was production on Outlander season 6 delayed?

As has been said by the cast and crew many, many times, Starz is taking tons of safety precautions to ensure everyone stays safe and healthy. Safety concerns during the pandemic was the reason shooting was delayed so much in the first place. Speaking to Elle, executive producer Matthew B. Roberts talked about the efforts they were making to get things started once again:

"I didn’t want me or the staff changing what the story is for COVID. We have a lot of intimate scenes—that’s where we live and breathe. The solution was relatively obvious: testing, testing, testing, testing. We had to figure out how to make sure we tested everybody a million times before they walked onto set and keep that bubble as safe as possible. That was our main focus—making sure everybody feels safe walking onto a set in the studios and locations."

Many are wondering if the quality of Outlander’s storytelling will be impacted by all these changes, but according to Roberts we have nothing to worry about. “I don’t know how to write ‘COVID-friendly scenes,’ certainly not an Outlander scene, because we are going to have people next to each other, being emotional—you talk close to people, and that’s where it transfers COVID,” he explained. “We had to figure out, how do we keep Outlander, Outlander? So we wrote the scripts [as originally intended] and dove in with production: Our producer in the U.K., Guy Tannahill, and our new production designer, Mike Gunn, and our staff over there who have worked on Outlander for a long time. We said, “Okay, this scene can’t happen like this. If we did this, this, and this, then we can make it happen.”

"We put a lot of people in scenes, and keeping everybody safe is paramount. We’ve tried to limit the amount of SAs (supporting artists), and we’re trying to utilize visual effects. In the deep, deep background, we can use digital people instead of what we would normally use, real extras. Every year, Outlander has a big event and we’re still planning that event. We’ll film [the background extras] at a separate time, [then] put it all together in post, and it’s seamless. We have a really amazing visual effects team, and I have full faith in their abilities to do that. We’re actually pretty experienced with it because many of the Alamance battle scenes had digital people in them. We added to the crowd and to the battle numbers with digital soldiers and conflicts in the background in post, and I don’t hear a lot of people talking about it. When no one notices a visual effect, that’s a good thing."

Basically, we have nothing to worry about when it comes to Outlander staying Outlander.

The season 6 premiere can’t come soon enough!

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