That sumptuous Game of Thrones score…..

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kY2evrkfbiM

I’ve already played this sumptuous score from the Game of Thrones more than once.

Series composer Ramin Djawadi has given an interview about he crafted the score for “Winds of Winter,” called “Light of the Seven.”

“I started Twitter maybe three or four weeks ago, but when the finale aired, my Twitter account blew up,” he noted.

“Light of the Seven” is right up there with a Lost score, if you ask me.

Warning: Plot details! Be sure you have watched S6 finale!

You can read more of the interview with Hollywood Reporter here:

What were your initial ideas in approaching this piece?

The interesting thing to me was the use of the piano. When we started the season, [showrunners David Benioff and Dan Weiss], and Miguel Sapochnik, the director of the episode, reached out to me and said, “There’s something coming up in episode 10.” We talked about “The Light of the Seven,” and how it needed to be a new piece of music. Any kind of character theme could tip it, and we didn’t want to tip the audience. Miguel brought it up: “What about the piano?” We discussed it. The piano is not really in the language of the Game of Thrones score. We went back and forth about it, and then we came up with the organ, which we used last season with Cersei during the atonement walk and some of the other scenes when she’s in prison. But the piano was the new instrument. What I love about Game of Thrones is that it’s a fantasy show and fantasy world, and already in the history of the show, I’ve run wild with instrumentation. There’s modern synthesizers in it and all kinds of things. So why not? Let’s have the piano. It’ll be a big surprise, and it’s what we want to achieve. And there’s really nothing like it. The piano has this decay and attack at the same time. We even experimented with the harp, but the harp was not as haunting as the piano.

The piano plays in a versatile way, as well. The sequence builds from the audience and characters having little information, to having all of the information — for most of them, a bit too late. It lines up with the piano’s quieter points, gradually becoming stronger in moments of revelation.

Exactly. The piano has a huge dynamic range that almost no other instruments have. It can play very low and it can play very high. It has the attack of the note and the long decay of this haunting feel. It all felt like a perfect fit. What’s great about the scene, too, is there’s hardly any dialogue. It’s nine minutes long. I knew I had to start minimal and give it space. Let notes ring, then give it space, and build up the anticipation from there, without tipping in either direction. You want to watch the scene and slowly realize, “Wait, what are these kids doing here? And what’s this?” And you see the wildfire dripping. You start putting things together, like, “Wait, what’s going on?” It was very fun to build. We have organ in this, we have cello, we have solo violin. The big orchestra, the strings, don’t even come in until the very last minute or so of the piece. It was so tempting to start earlier, and make it blow up earlier, but I felt like it would be nice to wait until you see the visual of the wildfire and you realize what’s going on.

Game of Thrones isn’t going to have a digital clock on its nuclear bomb like you would see in 24, for instance, but the strings signal the final countdown until the boom.

Right, exactly. It was an amazing opportunity to have a long sequence that can carry music like this. In the history of Game of Thrones, there’s also a lot of sequences that are without music. The show is very well spotted with where music comes in and where it doesn’t come in. Very rarely do we have these long pieces of music like this. This season I think we had it more than in any other season… even the early episodes, like the Hodor scenes [in “The Door”], that’s a ten minute section with all music and very beautiful shifts within. And the “Battle of the Bastards” as well. That’s a 22-minute sequence.

Meanwhile ABC reports it was Australia’s Illoura productions who was behind VFX on the amazing “Battle of the Bastards” fight in the penultimate episode of the sixth season.

The animation work consisted of motion capture, rotomation and key frame for horses and soldiers that build into a library of custom interactions and motion behaviours, the studio said.