‘Game of Thrones’ production designer shares world-building secrets with Filipino filmmakers

MANILA, Philippines — From the fictional world of Westeros to Essos, Gemma Jackson, the production designer for the first three seasons of HBO’s “Game of Thrones,” shared how fortunate she felt to have crafted the grand and award-winning set designs for the show. It ultimately won her a Primetime Emmy Award for Season 2.

“‘Game of Thrones’ was a stand-alone kind of experience,” began Gemma when asked by The STAR during a presscon on how she designed the massive set for the series. She was recently in the country for the inaugural FEST Film Lab workshop where she taught Production Design to Filipino filmmakers alongside her husband, Andrew McAlpine.

“I think it sort of changed television and I think it really pushed things on to another level. I was extraordinarily lucky to get that job,” continued Gemma.

“It was a case of delineating all the different worlds, of creating this massive sort of labyrinth that it was. And I think the most important thing to begin with was just to establish the kind of terrain, if you like, and then it got more and more complex as people travelled off to all sorts of extraordinary places. But I think for you, the audience, to always kind of know pretty much whose story you were following and where you were.”

Gemma’s fascination for Italianate architecture inspired her to create the look and feel of King’s Landing.

“So I just decided, and nobody fought with me, that all things at King’s Landing were going to be sort of vaguely Italian. And off I went with gorgeous arches and it worked really, really well. And we built some fantastic sets in Ireland that were very kind of… we could move and we could put weddings in the middle, we could go back to rooms. I think that was the biggest, the most successful.”

They filmed in Dubrovnik in Croatia, Iceland and Spain, but mostly in Ireland, which Gemma cited for its stunning and amazing landscapes.

“We did a huge amount of work in the landscape (in Ireland),” she recalled. “And so much of it is actually owned by very poor sort of landed gentry who were desperate for money. And so they’d let you do all sorts of extraordinary things on their land, which if it was public, they’d go, ‘I don’t think so.’ So that was really cool. I think it was just the scale of it all that was so amazing.

“And getting one’s head around the scale, and then living it because you had to live it and because it was so huge, there was so much to think about all the time. You just had to throw yourself in. So that’s really why I did one year, which included the pilot (episode) and all the research and where to go. And then I did three seasons. And then I decided, I’d quite like to see (my husband) Andrew again, sort of think about something other than Daenerys’ throne or something like that.”

Aside from “Game of Thrones,” Gemma is also the production designer behind the incredible set of the HBO miniseries “John Adams,” directed by Tom Hooper, which earned her a second Emmy.

She was also nominated for both an Academy Award and a BAFTA for the film “Finding Neverland.” Her other works include Disney’s “Aladdin,”  “King Arthur: Legend of the Sword,” “Bridget Jones’s Diary,” “Bridget Jones: The Edge of Reason,” “Iris,” “The Borrowers” and “Death Defying Acts.”

She bagged the Australian Film Institute Award for her work in “Death Defying Acts.”

Meanwhile, the FEST Film Lab, headed by Filipe Pereira, was organized in collaboration with the Film Development Council of the Philippines.

The six-day training program featured specialized mentorship sessions with global film industry experts, including Film Editing Workshop with Alex Rodriguez, Auditioning for Film and TV with Nancy Bishop,  Telling the Story with Sound: A Workshop with Mark Ulano and Patrushkha Mierzwa and Film Financing in an Entrepreneurial Age Workshop with Paul Miller.