Final series of Game of Thrones starts filming next week

The eighth and final season of Game of Thrones will begin principal photography on 19 October with the production office at its usual home in Belfast.

The final run will comprise six episodes, but reports have suggested that as filming is scheduled to go on up until summer 2018, the instalments will be delivered as longer episodes – as with Series 7 - than the usual 60 minutes of the earlier runs.

Game of Thrones is based at Titanic Studios Belfast and has been credited with raising Northern Ireland’s profile as an international production hub.

The HBO show is renowned for taking in a wide variety of filming locations, which in the past have included Croatia, Malta, Iceland, Canada and many parts of Spain. The budget for the final series is reportedly set at around $15m per episode.

The directors of Series 8 will be David Nutter, Miguel Sapochnik, and series creators David Benioff and D B Weiss.