8. Iceland Is A Horrible (Yet Beautiful) Place To Shoot
Remote Iceland is renowned for its beauty, but out in the sticks it can be hard to film absolutely anything. During season two's filming of Jon and Ygrritte's scenes in The Old Gods And The New and A Man Without Honor, the crew only had five hours of daylight in which to film, and often in awful weather (it rains and snows up there, changing very quickly) which needed digital correction come post-production. However, just because correction was used, it didn't mean that CGI also made an appearance in the scenes North Of The Wall. According the showrunners, the only CGI thrown into the Iceland scenes in season two was when Mance Rayder's camp becomes visible. Of course, since then they've been back to Iceland and broken their CGI duck, using some computational jiggery-pokery to create a giant out of a regular-sized man. Hell, you can't have it all I guess, and 20-foot humanoids is where you tend to draw the line. Still, they did drag props up there made out of fake whalebone dolled up with leathers and trinkets you could only find such a harsh environment proving that just because it might be difficult to set up, you can't shirk on the authenticity.