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spyson t1_itkgy3o wrote

Pretty big spoiler for game of thrones and the 10th episode of HotD, if you haven't seen it, in the article.

> Did you agree with Miguel Sapochnik’s plan to keep “Driftmark” so dark that most people, even ones with a really good TV, could barely see what was happening, if at all?

> The unique challenge of making television post-production is that you’re making it in this highly calibrated facility with millions of dollars’ worth of equipment and high-end professionals. At the end, if you’re making a movie, you turn over those files to movie theaters, where you know that there’s a reasonable sameness in quality in terms of the way the media is going to be exported and the equipment that it’s being seen on. When you’re making television, you’re turning it over to not only tens of millions of different television setups — rooms with curtains and no curtains, lighting and no lighting, speakers and no speakers — but you’re also turning it over to these different distributors who are going to take the file and compress it or not compress, or show it and 1080P or 4K. It’s very hard to account for all those little variables when you’re when you’re making the show.

> What I learned in the making the season is that you do have to take much more into account the fact that we are making the show for people’s television sets versus in a perfectly calibrated movie theater environment. So, you know, look, that was Miguel’s episode, and Miguel and [director of photograhy] Fabian Wagner, they were in charge of posting the episode and color correcting, and they’re geniuses in that way, so they should have. They brought it to a place where they were happy with it and thought it was great and that’s what got released on television.

I'm so freaking glad that Ryan Condal gets it and that Sapochnik and his dark ass taste won't be in for season 2.

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xywv58 t1_itl4ruo wrote

More when LoTR Two towers helms deep battle looked great, sometimes blue "night" is better

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Gozillasbday t1_itlo699 wrote

Even when HotD did day for night whatever filter they used looked like garbage. I could see the episode fine, but it looked muddy. My TV is good and I've adjusted all the settings as experts recommended it was just bad.

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rhino369 t1_itm8bqd wrote

Agreed. The Got 8x03 episode looks great on my OLED TV in the dark. It feels dark, but you can see.

The driftmark episode of HOTD looked weird and gray.

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SecretDracula t1_itn7n9y wrote

"Nope" had a ton of night scenes, which were all day-for-night, and they looked great on my cheap tv. So the technology is here to make it look good.

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Gozillasbday t1_itn8anx wrote

I don't see what this has to do with my comment? Did you mean to reply to someone else?

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SecretDracula t1_itnamp4 wrote

Just agreeing and adding on to what you said. Maybe it wasn't clear, I was talking about how the movie "Nope" knew how to make day-for-night look good, so HotD has no excuse.

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neok182 t1_ito97vo wrote

The DP for NOPE came up with a brand new way of shooting night time scenes using a combination of digital infrared and film cameras lined up identically and then edited together in post.

Thanks to this invention the night scenes looked so amazing and that's why the other commenter pointed it out. Hopefully given the praise of NOPE and this system we'll see this type of filming really take off and used in more film and tv. Especially in TV since they always seem to do a horrible job with night scenes.

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doktor-sausage t1_itm95pa wrote

Helm's Deep wasn't day for night, though. They actually did 3 months of night shoots for it.

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PsyGuy98 t1_itn6rw2 wrote

What a reddit moment. Sapochnik directed some of the best episodes of GoT and HotD ever but you're happy he's gone because he made some scenes dark?

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trianglefish_ t1_itop8h6 wrote

It's a bit much to be glad he's gone, but "made some scenes dark" is an understatement. The Long Night is the climax to the show's single biggest storyline and I couldn't tell what happened in most of it. It wasn't just suboptimal, or annoying, or unattractive: it stopped me from understanding the story at the story's apex. I think it's reasonable to complain about that, and to complain if the same person does it again. (The HotD episode wasn't nearly as bad, but I still had to pause and change my TV settings three times to make the episode clear as it went through daylight/unlit/firelit/daylight.)

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annoyingrelative t1_itkwdoj wrote

Holy hell, that entire answer is basically:

Miguel doesn't care about the millions of subscribers who aren't watching HotD on 70 inch OLED 4k TVs - He will film the show like you all have Dolby Atmos home theaters

House of the Dragon was very good, but it felt like Season 5 and 6 of Game of Thrones, not quite as great as the first 4 seasons of GoT.

That's when spectacle overtook story, and it seems as though Miguel is about spectacle

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Harricot_de_fleur t1_itl056b wrote

>it felt like Season 5 and 6

Wait really we haven't watched the same s5-6 of GoT

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Servebotfrank t1_itl4rz7 wrote

Yeah personally I thought season 6 was awful and was saved by the last two episodes. Meanwhile I've liked or at worst, was entertained by every episode of HotD so far.

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Snuffl3s7 t1_itl7x6d wrote

The Hodor episode was also pretty good.

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BaelBard t1_itl9f8q wrote

The Hodor episode had a banger of an ending, but it also had one of the worst scenes in the whole show - The Kingsmoot (Euron becoming king), which people tend to forget.

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ras344 t1_itlf078 wrote

I'll never forgive them for what they did to my man Euron.

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Snuffl3s7 t1_itl9mbq wrote

Fair enough, I only started watching the show in season 6 so to me that was the standard of the show.

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AzorAhai1TK t1_itlvmq8 wrote

Man Seasons 5/6 get a much better rep than they deserve, they hold up terribly on rewatch especially once you start thinking about character motivations for two seconds

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inputfail t1_itlsslo wrote

Hell I have a 77 inch OLED and could still barely see anything that episode. I think it’s he compression that HBO uses is just bad and that doesn’t help with how dark the episode already is.

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Radulno t1_itmjvgv wrote

S1 of HotD is extremely low on spectacle (some people even complain about that), it's mostly about people talking and political plays

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trianglefish_ t1_itp3vv5 wrote

>it felt like Season 5 and 6 ... That's when spectacle overtook story

Is that an unrelated thought, or do you think HotD places spectacle above story? Because personally, I thought it was very restrained spectacle-wise, especially for a show that has such obvious opportunity for it. The only moment that I think could fit into that category is Rhaenys busting through the floor and threatening Aegon on dragonback, when there must have been some more practical exit. Outside of that, I think the show firmly places story ahead of spectacle, and that all the spectacular moments fit naturally into the story and don't feel like they happen just to have something spectacular happen. They also don't go on any longer than they have to. Scenes like Aegon claiming Vhagar, Vhagar chasing Arrax, or Daemon killing the Crabfeeder are spectacles, but they contribute vitally to the story and/or character development and could have all been twice as long without it being too weird if they wanted to emphasize spectacle more.

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InconspicuousRadish t1_itnbfn2 wrote

I have a 65 inch OLED, and even on that, the episode is not visually pleasing. It feels unnatural, like someone cranked up gamma a lot.

I like Miguel's directing generally, but this obsession of his is really weird.

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