HBO's adaptation of Game of Thrones - Thread 2. There are a lot of nerds.

i hope they find some hair conditioner on their travels

Windy salty air does that to hair.

wood steel iron throne

what is dreads may never die

xpost

I think since the beginning of the show they've skimped on crowd scenes, CGI or otherwise, to a degree that has let many scenes feel strangely underwhelming. I think if you watch the show and just assume there's another couple hundred people in any scene that seems like there should be more people, it makes more sense.

pretty much this. When I watch this show I just imagine that everything is happening on a grander scale than what is actually depicted. Basically just like when you watch Star Trek or similar shows you just have to assume that there are more than 12 people living on the planet they are currently on.

I think it has been stretched thin for certain scenes in an even more visible way this season, even though I believe the budget is now huge. like certain scenes just feel really cheap and weak, and they're not helped by bad acting or crappy functional writing. Whenever Dario appears or basically anywhere sandy it becomes a bit sort of stock or something. like certain locations have no real character to them and no chance for you to feel any affinity to them - they just kind of appear. i think the show generally has more weight when people are in dark medieval-type sets, or in the ice and snow near the wall. all the sunny or desert places and costumes and characters have a pretty cheesy feel to them.

not slating the show, i like it fine. i just think you can see the joins sometimes as they try to tell so many stories all at once.

Maybe I'm just better at ignoring this stuff than other people. I mean I definitely noticed the Star Trek-like sets when Dario and Jorah were in Dothraki City, but it doesn't really affect my enjoyment of the show. Same thing with the Iron Islands, if they say there's enough people and wood to build a fleet of ships I just assume that it's true, I don't need a shot of a huge crowd and a forest.

^^^^^^

yeah it doesn't really affect my enjoyment of the show either. it's just kind of amusing, like isn't it possible to balance the budget a bit. i guess not, what would i know?

but they prob shouldn't be wasting money on rehiring sean bean to play a clown version of himself when they can't even afford a picturesque desert.

That stuff gets worse the newer the setting is to us, and the fewer characters there are there. Winterfell and King's Landing and Castle Black all feel like reasonably fleshed out places to me, whereas Dorne might as well be a garden and a prison and Mereen is like one oversized throne room and not much else. Some of the actors definitely suffer from that 'walk onto the scene like you're in Final Fantasy' thing - Dario and Grey Worm especially.

The city where Dany was hanging in S2 was pretty cool though.

I think it's also that a lot of the time they're filming in genuine historical sites with limited time and scope for world-building. That doesn't really explain the Iron Islands though.

but they prob shouldn't be wasting money on rehiring sean bean to play a clown version of himself when they can't even afford a picturesque desert.

― japanese mage (LocalGarda), Wednesday, May 25, 2016 12:01 PM (1 minute ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

I don't know what they were thinking. Powerful scene though.

reading about the logistical and project management requirements of "directing" a show that is being filmed in five completely separate locations at once was terrifying. I need to find that article again

It doesn't seem that hard to me to hire a couple of hundred locals to dress in rags and stand in the background as opposed to like 5 guards with spears or clubs like extras in a cheap opera. It's an expensive show, and I understand the limitations, but the production design and in particular sense of scale is paramount to an all epic all the time show like this. Every location seems to have been reduced to an underpopulated one-room set. If they can offer thousands of snow zombies just standing there, let alone cheesy crawl on the ceiling movie zombies, they can sure as hell throw in a couple of more dudes at the wall or washing their dirty rags in the background or whatever. Especially since if anything the epic scale and whatnot seems to have decreased as the budget has gone up. Maybe they need more money to keep the actors around? Maybe they thought they'd be able to cast a real dragon and, unable to find one, were shocked at the cost of CGI dragons that are integral to the story?

I dunno, I get it, and I still haven't descended into hate watching this at all, but at the same time, I'm having trouble with it. The mitigating positives are getting less apparent to me than the pervasive silliness and incoherence and solemnity in face of same.

I'm sure any limitations are due to rising costs of the star actors. For example Peter Dinklage started as a pretty low profile actor.

Also the early season set designs/extras may not be as great as you remember, I'd do some revisiting before being so sure.

Fun facts: You don't have to pay or feed CGI zombies, but you do have to feed and pay extras, and the job of casting and coordinating them, making sure they don't pull focus in the scene, and can repeated their actions take after take, is non-trivial.

Yeah, I'd guess it was the actors budgets rising, the last two seasons have looked cheaper to me but there had also been more big cgi reliant scenes that the earlier seasons didn't have so much. I think Arya's current setting looks pretty good.

But honestly, how many good looking epic fantasy films are there? The genre is particularly vulnerable to less than brilliant cgi because it looks more jarring than it would in tech heavy sci-fi.

The first three Lord Of The Rings films seem fairly unique to me.

Variations on the same problem has been there all over. I don't get where people live in the Vale as well, for instance. And really, there's supposed to be a town right outside of Winterfell, and a pretty busy life there, which I was surprised to find out.

i am sorry but krull is a feast for the eyes

Dragonslayer looked good

^

For example Peter Dinklage started as a pretty low profile actor.

Rude!

Dragonslayer also directly referenced in Game of Thrones

xp

Are Dragonslayer and Krull good films?

Tarsem Singh's The Fall is pretty great looking but just okay as a film. There's no creatures so there's no special effects issues.

I won't defend Krull but yeah Dragonslayer is good, p unusual film

Krull has a magnificent score by the young spoiling for a fight James Horner but I can't remember much else about it. Dragonslayer is pretty bold and different and I really need to see it again.

will no one defend Ladyhawke

Dragonslayer is good, and gold standard practical dragon (more or less).

Krill looks like shit. The thing about GoT is, yeah, I understand CGI is expensive, and dragons and wolves and zombies, etc., but 90% of the show is still people standing in a room talking. That costs money, too, but I can't imagine it is prohibitive. I can only assume as with big Hollywood movies that there is a lot more CGI than is at first obvious. I'd love to know how much that stuff costs, per minute, per effect, or whatever.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hfXP1RHLLx4

Now, see, in this clip they're very proud of themselves, but maybe I am spoiled by FX and stunts and stuff but it still seems pretty modest, by the standards or that stuff, or at least not very novel. And tbh I didn't leave that scene bowled over or anything, not least because it reminded me of so many swarms of zombies blockbuster scenes. Which is ultimately a problem of writing and direction.

i want to mute longneck, dog latin, and josh in chicago from this thread lol

lets laboriously explain why this 'plot hole' is not a plot hole

Well the "now you become me" comment combined with the time warp suggests that this show wants him to be bran but what do i know?

― human and working on getting beer (longneck), Monday, May 23, 2016 4:29 PM (2 days ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

like jfc

krull is fucking insane

and holy shit liam neeson is in it

http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0085811/fullcredits?ref_=tt_cl_sm#cast

Conan the Barbarian looked p good, was that epic enough

You mean OG or the one with Khal Drogo?

Ahnuld version

It has good looking parts but I've never liked the Arnie Conan films. People who think that's the best version of Conan (books, comics or screen) are nuts.

Haven't seen the Khal Drogo version but he definitely looks more like Conan.

why look at the world created in conan the destroyer when you can drink in the acting prowess of arnold, wilt chamberlain and grace fucking jones?

More recent Conan was trash anyway.
Not read much Howard. My elder brother was into him in his early teens. He's now been in the SWP forabout 35 years. Is that bad pendulum thought or something?

Thought some of the 70s comics looked pretty good. But still not read that many.

Winterfell and King's Landing and Castle Black all feel like reasonably fleshed out places to me

i've long been bothered by the sense that both are pretty much just a single courtyard w/ a few rooms scattered around the edges. castle black, this supposedly eons-old keep that protects the entirety of civilization from northern invaders, seems barely big enough to house 100 men, if that. oh, and it's got an an elevator. in the early episodes, winterfell was fleshed out ok, but since then, it's shriveled down to that one, dumpy courtyard.

Well, there's also the kennel where Ramsay kills people.

Yeah, what happened to the elevator budget? We used to see people on that thing all the time.

King's Landing is down to that one room with a table, a couple of hallways. Been a while since we even saw the throne.

They probably have one dark room that they use for all the dark stuff. Kennel, tree room, dragon dungeon, King's Landing dungeon. The Iron Island's room with the fireplace.

I forgot there even was a throne. Game of Scenes.

Game of Room

The geography and architecture and costuming of Astapor and the freeing of the unsullied and gathering the army army was incredibly epic as were the Baratheon siege of Kings Landing, the red wedding and the fighting pit in the colosseum that ended with the Dany flying off on Drogon.

Incidentally, have we ever been to Highgarden in the show? At one point in the negotiations for the financing of the wedding Olleana Tyrell (Diana Rigg) mentions that they have already donated sth like 500,000 soldiers, 300,000 heads of cattle etc. I remember being unconvinced by the numbers anyway.