13. The Direwolves Are Actual Wolves (With A Twist)
Putting gigantic now-extinct wolves onscreen was never going to be an easy task, but for most of season one, the crew could easily circumvent the problem by using puppy dogs and then full-grown huskies in place of the Stark children's not-yet-gigantic pets. For a while this works out, yet still, come the end of that series onward there comes a time when you've got to bite the bullet and stick these mammoth creatures on-screen. This left the VFX department chief among them Rainer Gombos and Steve Kulback with something of a problem. When dogs clearly wouldn't do as representatives as the sigil of House Stark, they had to come up with an alternative to wolves, which are clearly far too dangerous to have on set. Yet even though they'd convincingly put dragons onscreen using CGI, doing the same for wolves who aren't nearly as fantastical as creatures might seem a bit too obvious and break the illusion of a 'real' world. The resolution to this problem was ingenious they shot footage of wolves by themselves, before slowing the footage down and blowing up the animal's size in post-production and superimposing them into the scene. While shooting, the far less imposing tennis-ball-on-a-stick method was used so the actors would have something to act against. I'm guessing that over the course of Bran's arc, Isaac Hempstead-Wright will eventually become sick of tennis in all forms. After all, there's only so many times a guy can act opposite sports equipment before he picks up some sort of irrational hatred for Andy Murray.