Last bit of news is this tweet from Philip McGinley (Anguy), who indicates that his filming is done for the year. With nearly four months of filming time still remaining, this is a lot quicker than I expected. How to explain this super-fast filming? My guess is that this season they are filming stuff in storyline blocks, as opposed to episode blocks. In past years, they would film in rough chronological order, so later episodes were always filmed later in the year. Now it sounds like they may be filming entire story arcs at a time, so scenes from later episodes would already be in the can even now, at this early stage.
More evidence supporting this new approach, I have heard that they are running 3 filming units in Northern Ireland this year. In past years, they would generally run one unit in Northern Ireland and one in Croatia or Malta or Iceland. To have 3 units running in NI right now is pretty intense. My guess is, with filming set to occur in 4 countries, that they are pushing to film all, or nearly all, the NI stuff now. They will then move on to Croatia and Morocco, and then film in Iceland last. This would likely be the most efficient and cheap way to do it. The problem is the difficulty in handling the scheduling of directors, who would need to constantly be swapped out to handle their episodes scenes, but they may have decided juggling directors was easier than juggling actors and filming locations.
