Some interesting stats to give a sense of just how big Rafe's task is

[Scarloc99]

So this is back of a cigarette packet stuff but I found myself wondering how WOT stands up to other adaptations of book to screen in terms of book length vs screen time given to the story. 

 

Feel free to discuss, and suggest other series that it would be worth doing this for. 

 

Book	Number of words	Audible duration (hrs)	Screen time Hrs	Screen Time Mins	Words/ Screentime
WOT	4410036	461	64	3840	1148
Harry Potter	1084170	117	19.5	1170	926
LOTR	481103	54	11	660	728
GOT  seasons 1-5	1770000	198.5	46	2760	641

 

But to my mind it demonstrates that there is a massive job being able to adapt the series to the books. harry potter to my mind is a bit of an outlier in that the story is very linear and therefore it is easier to tell the straight line tale. But LOTR and Got show that by rights WOT should be approx 105 hours long to come in on 700 words per min of screen time. Please note I ignored the hobbit, personally I always felt that book would need to be 2-3 movies long, every chapter is a 30-40 min set piece, with the escape from the elves taking a little longer and without needing PJ to totally re write and change the books. 

 

So as much as people want to complain about the cuts and changes that are made, the fact is that at 64 hours the challenge is huge, at that point as you start wielding the axe to cut the material down you need to start re writing large parts of the story just to be able to make it something a non book reader can follow. 

 

 

I am not looking for this to become yet another thread where we complain about what he has done or the changes he has made. This is more about making people aware of just how monumental this task is, and maybe us discuss ways other adaptations have worked. 

 

Edited December 4, 2021 by Sir_Charrid

[Elder_Haman]

I really hope the success of this first season leads to some 10 episode seasons down the road. I think the show would really benefit from that.

[Harad the White]

1 hour ago, Sir_Charrid said:

Please note I ignored the hobbit, personally I always felt that book would need to be 2-3 movies long, every chapter is a 30-40 min set piece, with the escape from the elves taking a little longer and without needing PJ to totally re write and change the books. 

It's a great job thanks.

 

I think we agree that the Hobbit could have been 6 hours of screen time with a more strict adaptation. What is the last column for the Hobbit as is? [212 see below.]

 

One suggestion, cut the fractions off the words/screentime in the last column. 

Edited December 4, 2021 by Harad the White

[Mailman]

23 minutes ago, Sir_Charrid said:

So this is back of a cigarette packet stuff but I found myself wondering how WOT stands up to other adaptations of book to screen in terms of book length vs screen time given to the story. 

 

Feel free to discuss, and suggest other series that it would be worth doing this for. 

 

Book	Number of words	Audible duration (hrs)	Screen time Hrs	Screen Time Mins	Words/ Screentime
WOT	4410036	461	64	3840	1148.446875
Harry Potter	1084170	117	19.5	1170	926.6410256
LOTR	481103	54	11	660	728.9439394
GOT  seasons 1-5	1770000	198.5	46	2760	641.3043478

 

But to my mind it demonstrates that there is a massive job being able to adapt the series to the books. harry potter to my mind is a bit of an outlier in that the story is very linear and therefore it is easier to tell the straight line tale. But LOTR and Got show that by rights WOT should be approx 105 hours long to come in on 700 words per min of screen time. Please note I ignored the hobbit, personally I always felt that book would need to be 2-3 movies long, every chapter is a 30-40 min set piece, with the escape from the elves taking a little longer and without needing PJ to totally re write and change the books. 

 

So as much as people want to complain about the cuts and changes that are made, the fact is that at 64 hours the challenge is huge, at that point as you start wielding the axe to cut the material down you need to start re writing large parts of the story just to be able to make it something a non book reader can follow. 

 

 

I am not looking for this to become yet another thread where we complain about what he has done or the changes he has made. This is more about making people aware of just how monumental this task is, and maybe us discuss ways other adaptations have worked. 

 

Donating over 50% of a episode to a character that has zero impact on the overall story is a particularly poor use of time then.

[Skipp]

35 minutes ago, Mailman said:

Donating over 50% of a episode to a character that has zero impact on the overall story is a particularly poor use of time then.

Except by focusing on that character nonbook readers get a better understanding of the warder bond and the perils that come with it. 

Spoiler

This will set us up for the rumored season 3 death of Moiraine.

 

I know the nonbook readers that I interact with really enjoyed the Kerene and Stepin storyline and were crushed by the end of the episode.  Small sample size yes but I am hearing similar vibes from other nonbook readers.

[Harad the White]

Did the calculation, roughly, for the Hobbit and the last column is 212 words/minute. So as expected the Hobbit is the highest number of minutes/word by a factor of 3. Didn't bother me at all.

[Mailman]

9 minutes ago, Skipp said:

Except by focusing on that character nonbook readers get a better understanding of the warder bond and the perils that come with it. 

  Reveal hidden contents

This will set us up for the rumored season 3 death of Moiraine.

 

I know the nonbook readers that I interact with really enjoyed the Kerene and Stepin storyline and were crushed by the end of the episode.  Small sample size yes but I am hearing similar vibes from other nonbook readers.

The point i'm making is that as charrid said the problem of condensing a story as large as WoT into a a 64 episode run is huge and then to give such a huge chunk of time to a character that is not important is the wrong way to go. You could have easily explained the the effects of the warder bond by having steppin go insane after the death and charging the army in the field and then have someone explain to a incredulous Nynaeve what had happened and then reinforcing it furter in small steps in future episodes.

 

30 minutes of story could have given us the prologue of the book with Lews Therin and Ishmael., that would have been a far better use of the time and set the show up far better than the Steppin story line in this episode.

Edited December 4, 2021 by Mailman

[Skipp]

13 minutes ago, Mailman said:

The point i'm making is that as charrid said the problem of condensing a story as large as WoT into a a 64 episode run is huge and then to give such a huge chunk of time to a character that is not important is the wrong way to go. You could have easily explained the the effects of the warder bond by having steppin go insane after the death and charging the army in the field and then have someone explain to a incredulous Nynaeve what had happened and then reinforcing it furter in small steps in future episodes.

 

30 minutes of story could have given us the prologue of the book with Lews Therin and Ishmael., that would have been a far better use of the time and set the show up far better than the Steppin story line in this episode.

except we know we are getting the Prologue, just not in the first episode.  And while the Stepin plotline did go on for a little longer than I would have wished it played in nicely to where the episode was heading.  It is extremely hard to judge if the show runners have wasted their time until we see the entire season.  Once we know where the show is heading we can more properly judge what was wasted and what wasn't.  They have plot points they want to hit and that may not make sense to us atm.  But so far they are hitting the major plot points and character arcs of the books nicely.  I am extremely looking forward to see where they take us next.

 

And it sounds like you want an exposition dump to explain all of these plot points.  That is a quick way to lose an audience's attention.

Edited December 4, 2021 by Skipp

[Skipp]

And I forgot to mention that it isn't only the bond that we are showing and the affects it has one Warders and Aes Sedai that we are getting to see.  It is the foreshadowing of how it is going to affect Lan in the future.  Just showing Stepin go berserk rage into the army wouldn't show that.

[king of nowhere]

1 hour ago, Sir_Charrid said:

So this is back of a cigarette packet stuff but I found myself wondering how WOT stands up to other adaptations of book to screen in terms of book length vs screen time given to the story. 

 

Feel free to discuss, and suggest other series that it would be worth doing this for. 

 

Book	Number of words	Audible duration (hrs)	Screen time Hrs	Screen Time Mins	Words/ Screentime
WOT	4410036	461	64	3840	1148
Harry Potter	1084170	117	19.5	1170	926
LOTR	481103	54	11	660	728
GOT  seasons 1-5	1770000	198.5	46	2760	641

 

But to my mind it demonstrates that there is a massive job being able to adapt the series to the books. harry potter to my mind is a bit of an outlier in that the story is very linear and therefore it is easier to tell the straight line tale. But LOTR and Got show that by rights WOT should be approx 105 hours long to come in on 700 words per min of screen time. Please note I ignored the hobbit, personally I always felt that book would need to be 2-3 movies long, every chapter is a 30-40 min set piece, with the escape from the elves taking a little longer and without needing PJ to totally re write and change the books. 

 

So as much as people want to complain about the cuts and changes that are made, the fact is that at 64 hours the challenge is huge, at that point as you start wielding the axe to cut the material down you need to start re writing large parts of the story just to be able to make it something a non book reader can follow.

i have  used the same math myself a while ago for a different thread

[Harad the White]

Here's some others:

 

Hobbit:  212

Moby Dick: 1834

Lawrence of Arabia: 1476

 

WoT is child's play compared with Moby Dick and Lawrence of Arabia.;) 

[Daenelia]

I like the cold statistics. But is it capturing the dialogue vs descriptions? And how would you measure 'depth of story telling'? Harry Potter as you mentioned being very linear and almost ... staccato, for lack of a better literary term (I threw away my dictionary of literary terms, as no one seems to talk in those terms anymore ? ). And AsoiaF (GoT) frequently describes things that happen simultaneously, even if it is not always presented at the same time in the books. And tv shows often rely on being very linear, with the very notable exception of ... The Witcher.

 

It is a good starting point, but there are many aspects and things to consider. For instance: I think it was easier to condence HP that LOTR or WOT. Simply because itwas written for an audience that needed clear and shallow story telling compared to an older demographic.

[Scarloc99]

9 hours ago, Mailman said:

The point i'm making is that as charrid said the problem of condensing a story as large as WoT into a a 64 episode run is huge and then to give such a huge chunk of time to a character that is not important is the wrong way to go. You could have easily explained the the effects of the warder bond by having steppin go insane after the death and charging the army in the field and then have someone explain to a incredulous Nynaeve what had happened and then reinforcing it furter in small steps in future episodes.

 

30 minutes of story could have given us the prologue of the book with Lews Therin and Ishmael., that would have been a far better use of the time and set the show up far better than the Steppin story line in this episode.

Rafe has said this is coming, but he wants to show it when Lewis becomes important to the story, this I think is a good thing, if the scene is shown properly then we will see how technologically advanced the world is, clothing will be different, you will see destroyed TV's, Cars, buildings that look futuristic. That as an opener immediately spoils the big reveals later on. 

[Scarloc99]

47 minutes ago, Daenelia said:

I like the cold statistics. But is it capturing the dialogue vs descriptions? And how would you measure 'depth of story telling'? Harry Potter as you mentioned being very linear and almost ... staccato, for lack of a better literary term (I threw away my dictionary of literary terms, as no one seems to talk in those terms anymore ? ). And AsoiaF (GoT) frequently describes things that happen simultaneously, even if it is not always presented at the same time in the books. And tv shows often rely on being very linear, with the very notable exception of ... The Witcher.

 

It is a good starting point, but there are many aspects and things to consider. For instance: I think it was easier to condence HP that LOTR or WOT. Simply because itwas written for an audience that needed clear and shallow story telling compared to an older demographic.

I was trying to show that LOTR and GOT needed more screen time then WOT is getting for the amount of book there was, to me there is another big difference between them that this does not take into account, set piece battles on page vs in book. There are more "big fights" in WOT but the page time they receive does not equate to the time they will take on screen. Battle of Helms Deep is a great example, it is a relatively short chapter in the scheme of things but turned into a scene for the movie it become exponentially longer. I would say that LOTR probably matches up with WOT the closest in how the different stories are told one the party splits and also in terms of Dialogue vs Description and even then we see PJ was given far more time to tell his story then Rafe is. 

 

HP is the outlier but I decided to include it anyway rather then fudge the maths :). 

[Mailman]

I posted this in one of the other threads but it probably fits here more do you think Rafe is the right man to be helming a series of this size especially considering the difficulties raised in this thread.

 

Rafe does not exactly have a massive body of work behind him to helm a series of this size.

• 6 writing credits across 11 years consisting of 22 TV episodes and 1 short film(17min).
• 8 TV episodes as a story editor/assistant to writers and
• 35 TV episodes credited as a producer

Not exactly a stunning resume to helm a $10M a episode epic fantasy series.

[Daenelia]

14 minutes ago, Mailman said:

I posted this in one of the other threads but it probably fits here more do you think Rafe is the right man to be helming a series of this size especially considering the difficulties raised in this thread.

 

Rafe does not exactly have a massive body of work behind him to helm a series of this size.

• 6 writing credits across 11 years consisting of 22 TV episodes and 1 short film(17min).
• 8 TV episodes as a story editor/assistant to writers and
• 35 TV episodes credited as a producer

Not exactly a stunning resume to helm a $10M a episode epic fantasy series.

It's not bad and it shows he is progressing in his career. Plus he wrote for agents of shield, so that can be good or bad. He was also producing then.

 

There happen to be a lot of people who storm right in to helming a big production with little experience (or so it seems).

If you watch Peter Jackson's first films ... braindead ... you might not suspect he would be able to pull of a formidable trilogy (and follow it up with a less amusing trilogy. Im not a fan of The Hobbit.).

 

I dont think it has anything to do with the rest of the topic, other than that you list some cold statistics. Again, I like numbers. But it never shows the whole story ?

[king of nowhere]

2 hours ago, Mailman said:

I posted this in one of the other threads but it probably fits here more do you think Rafe is the right man to be helming a series of this size especially considering the difficulties raised in this thread.

 

Rafe does not exactly have a massive body of work behind him to helm a series of this size.

• 6 writing credits across 11 years consisting of 22 TV episodes and 1 short film(17min).
• 8 TV episodes as a story editor/assistant to writers and
• 35 TV episodes credited as a producer

Not exactly a stunning resume to helm a $10M a episode epic fantasy series.

rafe looks fairly young, too. it's normal that young people don't have as many things on their resume.

and yet, it's most often them who do revolutionary things. before writing the wheel of time, RJ himself had done nothing worth of note; he wrote some Conan books, who are basically pulp.

Sanderson, when he was tasked with completing WoT, had only published mistborn and elantris. maybe warbreaker? he was a promising young writer, but he didn't have "a massive body of work behind him to helm a series of this size".

Einstein, before he wrote a few papers that revolutionized physics, had done nothing noteworthy either.

[Pandemonium]

16 hours ago, Elder_Haman said:

I really hope the success of this first season leads to some 10 episode seasons down the road. I think the show would really benefit from that.

 

10 episode seasons seems almost necessary.  Some were saying that books 2 &3 were to be combined.  I really don't see how that is possible while building the characters and keeping enough plot lines going.  

 

Hopefully WOT is a smash hit that keeps growing after Christmas.  I read some articles that the Boyz season 2 received a much bigger budget.  Hopefully that happens to WOT as well

[MasterAblar]

Books 9 and 10 might as well be the same book, and you can probably fit a good bit of book 8 into them as well. With Dumai's Wells almost certainly being a seasons ending I'd say tha means you have 4 seasons to get from book 1 to book 6, then 2 to go from book 7 to book 10 and then 2 to finish off the last 4. Buf if the show has lasted that long I'm hoping they can spend a bit more time on the last 4, hopefully making it 3 seasons.

[WhiteVeils]

Why spend half an episode on a plot not in the story in season 1 when there is so much in the story?

Because later, in plots for
 

Spoiler

Rand and Alanna

The passing of the bond from Moraine to Myrelle

The actions of Lan later and Nynaeve

They won't have to reexplain this for each one.  They can show 'Previously, on Wheel of Time' with a flashback and everyone who watched this will go Oooooh and understand all the emotion and significance.

Also, one way to think of WOT is not thinking of it as 'A storyline with characters filling roles', but instead thinking of it as intersecting character arcs for each character.  I think Rafe is thinking of it this way.  How do we hit the character beats and advancement for each character in this story.  I mean, that's what we love, isn't it? The difference between where each character starts and where they end?

Given that, this setup with the death of the warder, will set up the full character arc for both Lan and Nynaeve. He doesn't have to show anything else of them except what's in the books for viewers to understand their developing love, the risks to their love, and how the situation resolves itself.  So he essentially shortcutted many scenes in future seasons by using this device.

[Maximillion]

Not really buying the length of the series argument and how difficult it is.

 This could be 20 seasons if the show was good enough.

 Plus, huge chunks of time are being given over to meaningless content that was not even in the books so if there is enough time for that, there was enough time to include significant elements of the books that were missed.

 

 This was a relatively easy job given the budget. The story is there with a HUGE amount of backstory, fan discussion and lore to draw upon.

 

 

 

Edited December 4, 2021 by Maximillion

[Harad the White]

17 hours ago, Sir_Charrid said:

This is more about making people aware of just how monumental this task is, and maybe us discuss ways other adaptations have worked

A couple more adaptations using that metric:

 

Charlotte's Web: 332--this is the closest to the Hobbit, and shows that stories directed to children tend to have the most screen time to words.

 

Blade Runner: 547 not a children's story but based on a novella.

 

Dune (Villaneuve): 1136 to 582, the last number assuming all of Part2 stays in Book 1. If not, then the range is between the two numbers, taking it below WoT.

 

War And Peace = 1392. 

 

And finally: 

 

The Mahabarata: 7984

 

WoT is the biggest ratio of words/screen time among the Fantasy genre above, but it is far smaller than The Mahabarata (Indian Myth and Legend), the only one that rivals RJ's number of words at 2.5M. Other works such as Moby Dick, Lawrence Of Arabia (Seven Pillars of Wisdom), and War and Peace also propose more of a challenge with regards to this metric. 

 

[ArrylT]

On a different light - the Shadar Logoth portion of EOTW is basically 2 chapters out of 53 and around 35 pages.   I havent had a chance to count the exact number of words - but curious to see if the time in the show is actually more than the percentage of EOTW. 

[Skipp]

1 hour ago, Pandemonium said:

 

10 episode seasons seems almost necessary.  Some were saying that books 2 &3 were to be combined.  I really don't see how that is possible while building the characters and keeping enough plot lines going.  

 

Hopefully WOT is a smash hit that keeps growing after Christmas.  I read some articles that the Boyz season 2 received a much bigger budget.  Hopefully that happens to WOT as well

My Theory on covering Books 2 and 3 in 1 season is to literally combine them. Books 2 and 3 share similar plot structure and character groups.  In each book the Groups split, head off on their own adventure and then suddenly combine back together for the finale.

 

Similar beats to tGH, the boys leave Fal Dara chasing after Fain and the Horn/Dagger.  The Seanchan invade Tear instead of falme.  The boys chase Fain to Tear instead of Falme, the girls hunt down Black Ajah in tear or are led their by Liandrin and are handed over.  Rand pulls Callandor and fights Balazamon in the sky.

 

I am sure there are major issues that would need to be worked out but I think it is very very possible that this could happen.

 

This would allow us to jump into season 3 covering tSR when WoT really gets interesting.

[Windigo]

1 hour ago, Pandemonium said:

 

10 episode seasons seems almost necessary.  Some were saying that books 2 &3 were to be combined.  I really don't see how that is possible while building the characters and keeping enough plot lines going.  

 

 

They have already pulled elements from Book 2 (3?) into season 1,  I can see that they will continue to do that combining similar plots from multiple books into the same season.  I can see them also pulling Book 1 plots like Camlyn  into future seasons where Carhein and Camlyn are more relevant.