Will they use any CGI?

[Werthead]

Interesting. Confirmation that Merlin S3 has actually been using MASSIVE itself, which is surprising given how low-res some of those CGI soldiers were.

Of course, if Merlin can use MASSIVE then the question would be is there any reason that HBO's effects partners can't?

[Ran]

Presumably you could use Massive to animate a "battle" between millions of stick-figures. The system helps animate complex scenes, but you still need time on the render farm to output that, and Hollywood film productions have way more rendering hours available to them than a TV production, even a costly one.

I'm sure Massive or some sort of similar system (I recently came across another at one of the VFX firms which I had heard had bid for the job) would be available for Game of Thrones, but they're not able to render it to LotR-levels of detail.... and that's the thing. HBO is not going to be satisfied with Merlin's cheaply-rendered battles. It has to look as good as everything else they do.

I think I can say that David told me that they're not going to be able to show armies of tens of thousands duking it out like they did in LotR -- you can't expect them to be able to have that much rendering power -- but that what they do show you, they want to make sure it's as "real" as possible. A few well-rendered CG effects with high fidelity to reality trumps large, complex but poorly rendered shots... at least, that's the plan at this time.

They're clearly not going to give us forty guys grunting and shouting with some noise in the background for a battle. But thousands of digital horsemen seen from close overhead slashing through thousands of high-res digital soldiers isn't on the cards, I expect. I'd be glad to be proved wrong, of course.

[The SmilingKnight]

I suggest watching Laurence of Arabia.

especially this part

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HO-v1f7k5UI

There is an awful lot you can do with couple of hundred extras and a bit of modern CGI on top (which LoA didnt have).

You just have to use them smartly and be tricky about it, unlike Jackson did.

[Ran]

600 horses and camels were used in that scene... to represent a force that involved about 600 horses and camels.

The Green Fork had tens of thousands of combatants and thousands of horses. You just can't do the same thing.

[The SmilingKnight]

Nobody is counting exact numbers when watching it. It looks impressive and our brains easily loose the distinction between several hundreds and "thousands".

Add to that same units being shot from different perspectives, same units acting other parts of the army, being duplicated, fused, tripled, mixed and what have you - and CGI backgrounds and CGI armies filling the areas further away.

Its not as if you need to show the complete battle in one take either. The camera folows only smaller parts of it, switches to main characters etc.

Im sure i dont have to teach any competent director the basics of his job.

BTW Lotr CGI looked extremely fake and its nothing to aspire to, in addition to being lousily directed.

[Ran]

I'm pretty sure there's nothing you could actually teach the directors... or the accountants. ;)

[The SmilingKnight]

Oh, i wager i could. Hopefully not about the basics of their job, as i said myself already.

I also wager i could teach you a thing or two about being snide.

Smiley or no smiley.

[Ran]

:rofl:

So, now that we've established what we've established regarding CGI and related matters...

I suppose the CGI thing I'm most interested in at present is when we're actually going to see some of the set up shots featuring King's Landing, the Red Keep, Winterfell, and the Wall.

Apparently the first couple of episodes are done and have VFX in place, so "Inside Game of Thrones" might well have a glimpse of those. Alternatively, we'll have to wait until the next teaser, which I wouldn't expect until late January at the earliest.

I did look at some of the concept art while at the production offices, and I'll be very interested in what the Red Keep looks like compared to what I saw (which I was told was quite early and was significantly changed).

[Andhaira]

I'm pretty sure there's nothing you could actually teach the directors... or the accountants. ;)

:lol:

In all seriousness however, I agree with Ran. HBO will focus on quality, but in doing so we will miss out on quantity. basically, i expect a few CGI scenes involving the two armies as they stand across the battlefield, and then closeups of Tyrion charging recklessly through out the fray. I also expect we will get to see Gregor Clegane in action in shots where we will be expected to go all "Ooooh thats so cool",

[Ran]

I've previously discussed the prospects for effects in some detail, BTW, over here. Need to update with the news that BlueBolt is providing the VFX for the show.

[Bronn Stone]

I'd rather the FX budget be used in small chunks to fill in backgrounds (much like you see in John Adams in Ran's link) rather than blowing the wad on big battle scenes. Bang for the buck has to be a consideration.

I definitely don't want the HBO muckety-mucks to have the impression that GRRM's fans will poo-poo the series if the effects aren't gold-standard across the board. The tale is much more about the people than the places.

ETA: Look at the oft-cited example of Pellenor Fields in LOTR. With an enormous effects budget fattened further by the success of the first two films, they STILL didn't have enough to do anything but make a dog's dinner of it. They had to castrate the forces of Sauron and buff up the 'green wave' of the Dead Men of Dunharrow to resolve the damned thing. I have little doubt this creative decision was made more by accountants than artists.

Don't try to do that which cannot be done.

[Werthead]

I definitely don't want the HBO muckety-mucks to have the impression that GRRM's fans will poo-poo the series if the effects aren't gold-standard across the board. The tale is much more about the people than the places.

I agree. However, every statement about the show's effects seems to be along the lines of, "Don't expect anything too impressive," which is bemusing. We've seen excellent effects done on television by shows with far smaller budgets than Thrones (BSG and Caprica to start with, also Doctor Who and various documentary series), although we've also seen dire effects on shows like Lost (which generally blew it when attempting anything even fairly ordinary, like the CGI sub, despite a fairly substantial budget) and of course Heroes ducked and avoided trying to depict an actual superheroics. Whilst expecting massive mega-battle scenes that put Troy or Alexander to shame is unrealistic, it's a long, long way from that to the extremely conservative attitude to effects we have seen on shows such as Rome S1 (although, even outside of Philippi, S2 was more ambitious and interesting, effects-wise).

There's actually no reason why they can't give us a decent rendition of the Blackwater. Keep the POV shots mostly restricted to Sansa's window or Tyrion and Joffrey's positions on the walls and you can have the ships sailing up the Blackwater, crowds of figures in the distance and so on. You could probably even have Davos on the ship without too much difficulty (as long as we're not expecting to see the blow-by-blow account of certain ships engaging other ships, men swarming over the sides etc), just restrict it to distant viewpoints and maybe ducking the odd arrow (something akin to the sea battle in John Adams, which gave the impression of being an extensive melee without actually showing us much), then a huge explosion and cutting away.

ETA: Look at the oft-cited example of Pellenor Fields in LOTR. With an enormous effects budget fattened further by the success of the first two films, they STILL didn't have enough to do anything but make a dog's dinner of it. They had to castrate the forces of Sauron and buff up the 'green wave' of the Dead Men of Dunharrow to resolve the damned thing. I have little doubt this creative decision was made more by accountants than artists.

Not that enormous. The LotR movies were actually made on a very tight budget, as giga-sized blockbusters go. The budget was 'only' about $90 million per film (or about $20 million less than each of the Star Wars prequels) with the effects crew only getting a small slice of that, which was fine for Fellowship but by the time they got to Return (which had three times the effects shots of Fellowship) that strain was clearly starting to show. In comparison Avatar's budget was about the same (maybe more) than all three LotR movies put together. LotR benefitted a lot from the beneficial exchange rate and using Weta's own in-house CGI team rather than an external American outfit.

In addition a lof of the simplifying that went into the LotR movies was also mainly for time reasons. There's no real reason why you couldn't have had Aragorn meeting up with the Rangers, having the Army of the Dead destroy the pirates at Pelargir, the southern fief armies board the ships and them attack the orcs from the rear whilst Imrahil and co lead their charge from Minas Tirith, but all of that takes time, probably adding another 15-20 mins to an already very long film and necessitating the casting of several more actors and all the complications that go with that (the cost, additional wardrobe issues and so on). Whilst Thrones is even more susceptible to budgetary problems, the time problem is less of a concern, especially in Season 1.

Don't try to do that which cannot be done.

At the same time, they shouldn't be too scared to push the envelope where possible. If the Sci-Fi beancounters had said back in 2002, "You want to do the Cylons completely in CGI and have them interacting with the real actors on a TV budget? Impossible! Cannot be done!", then BSG and Caprica would simply not have been possible.

[Ran]

I think you're interpreting the cautions differently than the producers have meant them.

I don't think they're saying "don't expect anything too impressive". They're saying don't expect blockbuster-film level CGI spectacle. They don't have the time or money for rendering very long, extremely complex shots for months. Crowd scenes like we're talking about -- battles with thousands of individual characters interacting -- seem to be an order of magnitude more difficult than BSG's battle sequences... one gathers that inanimate objects zooming around in space are a lot easier to work with than hundreds or thousands of individual animated figures.

There'll be more than the opening of Rome, but basically don't suppose we'll be getting the charge of the Rohirrim at Pelennor, either. That's my read of what GRRM has said, and what David Benioff told the reporters when I was at Magheramorne.

I expect them to push the envelop in attempting to achieve as high fidelity to reality as digital effects can allow -- see the Boardwalk effects video I linked earlier, which are practically seamless, to the point where you don't realize that half the effects shots in any given episode have passed you by, because they just didn't call any attention to themselves.

I'm crossing my fingers that the city and castle depictions knock my socks off. I think they have the ability to do that, especially when these are the sort of pieces that will be reused. I hope they trump the Tudorsin this particular regard -- they had a lot of shots of that sort, depicting various castles and palaces, and they were pretty good but a fair distance from being confused with reality.

[MountainThatRides]

I have a feeling that whatever they do will meet or exceed our expectations. Despite what other TV shows are doing, and regardless of the budget, I think too much CGI can be very harmful when it's used recklessly or excessively. There are movies designed to be a certain visual style (300), or movies that hinge on a visual spectacle (Avatar), and then there's pretty much everything else that just looks fake. It's sometimes frustrating that thirty-year-old movies look more realistic than something out this year, but this is a television show, not a big budget Hollywood fantasy epic. I'm personally glad that it won't look like Lord of the Rings; nothing against those films, as I quite love them, but this is a very different animal. Game of Thrones isn't a big fantastic spectacle, it's a gritty, character-driven, storyline-heavy drama. In many ways, it has more in common with historical fiction than standard fantasy fare.

That said, I think they'll be able to do a lot better than Rome. I love Rome, but the battle scenes were pretty jarring and rarely complimented the rest of the series, most of which looked simply stunning. An exception would be Pullo and Vorenus in the arena, which was very small scale. In my opinion, the best fights in all of ASoIaF are the duels; the joust gone wrong and how it comes to swords between Gregor and Sandor, the Hound vs. Dondarrion, the Mountain vs. Oberyn, Vardis Egan vs. Bronn, Jaime vs. Brienne, etc. All you need for that kind of stuff is a decent choreographer; if Highlander: The Series could do believable sword fights on such a small budget, I have nothing but high hopes for Game of Thrones and its handling of small-scale fights. Another prime example would be Tyrion & co. vs. the clansmen in the Mountains of the Moon, some of which we saw in the promo.

As far as the big battles, well, the Blackwater, the Whispering Wood, all of that, I'll gladly put my trust in the people in charge. If they can make it look believable and sell it to me, I won't complain. I wouldn't want it to be any other way. Realism is the key to identifying with the people in this world, and I'd rather see a couple of foreground knights duking it out in the muck than the charge of the Rohirrim.

Exchanges I hope to see, via flashback or however they might do it, is the Tower of Joy and Rhaegar vs. Robert. Keeping my fingers crossed.

[The SmilingKnight]

I wouldnt mind if they would look up to 1981 Excalibur at all.

[reiver]

An exception would be Pullo and Vorenus in the arena, which was very small scale.

I agree with what you said about everything else but i felt this was as much a stylistic choice as a lack of budget or ambition. I thought it was part of the decline of Pullo to be relegated to ending his life in a squalid little pit rather than even the relative glory of a death in a grand arena. Also the mechanics of Vorenus' intercession were a lot better in that place than they would be elsewhere. Either way, having seen the attempts at Arena in Spartacus i'm glad they stayed small.

I've just watched Centurion (the Neil Marshall film) and was very impressed by the standard and tactful use of CGI in it. They managed to convey army size, the appearance of a large battle and at least two long and detailed establishing shots of very impresive encampments as well as the beginnings of constrution on Hadrian's Wall. All of this on a budget of $12m. While there's obvious differences with aGoTs I think there's a lot of parallels and if they treat the large scale clashes in a similar way where they aren't giving lots of sweeping shots of thousands duking it out but at the same time aren't blatantly restricting the camera the battles will look great.

[arrowfan]

I wouldnt mind if they would look up to 1981 Excalibur at all.

Lol, I was going to mention Excalibur as an example of how a small cast pull it off. I watched this film only 1 year ago. Cult classic. One of the things I noticed was how small the battles were. They did seem a bit lonely, but it didn't bother me too much. What really did bother me was the sounds. Klink, klank, and diiiiing for all the sword fights. Gawd! At least that's something HBO will do a million times better.

The problem is audiences are spoiled now and it won't be as easy to pass off Excalibur scale battles as it was 30 years ago. Still, I'd much prefer the CGI budget goes into castles and wonders than battles. Sounds like they're doing just that. And, to be sure, ASOIAF is about people and places more than battles.