King’s Landing has a population of around 500k per Martin, which makes it somewhat larger than medieval London. Something like the Tourny of the Hand is one of the few entertainments to which the entire strata of society would be welcome to attend and in a time and place where there isn’t a lot of entertainment to be had for the commonfolk, it’s not hard to imagine that a significant amount of people would turn up. Certainly more than the two dozen or so that are shown on the show.
That tournament “crowd” was pretty sparse though. King’s Landing is the seat of power in Westeros and is quite large. Any tournament held there, even one on short notice, should have thousands of commoners and hundreds of nobles in attendance. They showed like 2 dozen people in the stands.
It made me fear for the mob scene later on. Will it be Monty Pythonesque where three guys in muddy clothes throw sticks and rocks at the procession as they ride by? “Help, help, I’m being repressed!”
Athryn
3303
Yeah, I was pretty disappointed in both the tourney scene as well as the hunting scene, which was supposed to be a renaissance style hunting, with all the pageantry involved.
The Tudors managed to totally nail this, as well as a large siege scene later on (as did The Borgias with the siege scene they had,) and I really hope that the GOT people maybe take a page from those productions.
Dufresne
3304
A few more show up than that, though it’s still pretty lightly attended. This shows the extent of the crowd at the tourney; it’s a screencap from that second FX video.
That entire “commoner” crowd on the left was digitally added. If they’d extended it out to the left, past the edge of the screen, problem solved.
Probably would’ve been a huge pain in the ass (ie, expensive) mixing 'em in with the trees.
I’m really interested in seeing what D&D do with season 2 now that they’re no longer rookies. Keep in mind that they’re both film writers and novelists, and that this is their first television job, which is pretty damn ballsy for HBO to basically entrust such an enormous endeavor to a couple of rookies. Sure, they got veteran producers to help them, but D&D are the showrunners at the end of the day.
They’ve admitted already that they learned a lot, particularly about estimating how long it takes to do certain things. And that’s huge, because at the end of the day, TV productions simply can’t fall behind schedule like feature film productions can. The logistics and scheduling dictate that if you can’t get a shot, you have to settle for whatever you’ve got and move on.
Quite a number of scenes that felt off were because of hitting the production wall. Arya stabbing the stableboy happened near the end of the last day they were allowed to film on that location in Malta, so they literally could only do a couple of takes. That’s why that scene feels so disjointed; they had to try and fix it in editing.
The hunting party was also a result of not having a lot of time left in the day to shoot it, and also exhausting the horse budget. D&D have said that one of the most important things they learned was that any scene with a horse takes twice as long to shoot as they anticipated.
CSL
3307
Much as I also think the tourney crowd was small I don’t care seeing as they didn’t know if they were getting a second season, didn’t know if the show would catch, and therefore needed to conserve budget as much as possible (for a hugely expensive show).
Damn, that CGI is impressive. As a punter, I had a rough sense that there was a lot of CGI in the series (obviously in shots where they had to multiply people, and/or show grand fantasy scenes/buildings in the distance), but I had no idea it was that ubiquitous.
Shows you how unobtrusive CGI can be, and still add lots of depth and wonder to something.
Athryn
3309
The Creative Arts Emmys were held I think this last weekend, and Game of Thrones surprisingly only came out with one win, for Main Title. Boardwalk Empire came away with 7 Emmys by comparison.
Full results here.
I’m glad they won Main Title though, because raving fanboism aside, that is one of the most amazing title sequences and themes I have ever seen for TV or movies.
MSUSteve
3311
Agreed. We watched the whole thing every week.
We’re getting our first season 2 footage tomorrow, prior to the new Boardwalk Empire. 2-3 minutes worth.
Rywill
3313
Sweet, can’t wait. Still no word on when we will get season 1 on DVD? I was hoping to have it out in time for the holidays, but I would think they’d have announced it by now if so.
Let me continue to show you how ubiquitous it is:
Looks like spring of next year, which is a stupid move. They could have moved a shitload of them for the holidays. The property is hot, hot, hot, and it could have really helped build the audience for Season 2.
HBO generally has a rule that the season DVD arrives just as the next season arrives, but something fucked up with Boardwalk Empire, because Season One still isn’t out on DVD, and won’t be until mid January. Season 2 will finish its run in early December, six weeks prior.
(Edit: Apparently, it’s not HBOGo-related, since that makes no sense. DVD/Blu-Rays are mainly for people who don’t subscribe to HBO, and HBOGo only works for subscribers. The word is that HBO apparently is going to have a strong fourth quarter, but forecasted a weaker first quarter. So they’re holding all their big DVD releases until the first quarter of next year to boost the numbers. Stupid.)
This is probably what they showed tonight:
Cool but not a lot to see so far. Some rough glimpses.
— Alan
I do appreciate how many of the new second-season characters are shown in that clip. Stannis, Melisandre, and Margaery are the obvious ones, and I’m guessing the guy in the green robe talking with Theon is Aeron Damphair. I had to watch it a second time to realize that the guy at 1:50 was Davos, but he’s there too. There’s even a brief shot of Brienne standing behind Renly at 1;46.
I love that the guy is wearing a Kingdom of Loathing T-shirt while being filmed.
Rywill
3319
Yeah, exactly. This is so stupid. I can’t tell you how many people I know who didn’t catch all the eps or got into it late. If the DVDs were out they could just watch everything to catch up. I would buy a box set for like five different people for Christmas, and I would probably get 15 sets given to me :) I just don’t understand this move at all. I mean, is it really better to even out your quarters than to make lots more money overall?
The new footage is cool. As Alan said, not a lot to see (I think just two lines of dialog from the actual show), but you get a sense of the production values (still good!) and you get to see glimpses of a lot of the new characters, and many of the old ones. And as always, the commentary from the producers is reassuring because they get it.
CSL
3320
I never really noticed that it was Liam Cunningham who will play Davos - or at least I hadn’t seen him in anything before a few months ago.
I think his casting is the most exciting thing for me right now after seeing him in Outcasts and Strike Back.
