or film indoors and use cgi

nothing strange. morocco is a big country. mostly semidesertic, but it has forested areas.

so you use one city for falme. then you take a trip to somewhere in the hinterland and you film a fight near tear. or you can use morocco for tear too, afaik it's homogeneous stilistically and you wouldn't want it too similar to falme, but nothing that can't be fixed with some cardboard enhancement to exhisting buildings.

it looks much cheaper than moving the whole cast and troupe in a whole country.

3 hours ago, Andra said:

If the post-production time is the same for season 2 as it was for season 1, it should drop in November, as well.  Season 1 filming wrapped in May of 2021, and it premiered six months later.

If they delay the season 2 premier until early 2021, that should only mean they are spending more time on visual effects, or re-edits.

 

If it doesn't happen, it won't be because they can't.

S1 had the covid stop after they already filmed the first 6 episodes, and they started working on post-production already. on the other hand, S1 was ready a lot sooner than november.

I say we can't use past schedule to infer what they can or cannot do with editing time.

now, if I were them, since there isn't official confirmation for S3, I suspect they may want to check how successful is S2 before that, and in that case I'd push to release as soon as possible, so that the cast can resume filming sooner. this kind of project is long enough, the young actors entering their fourties before it ends is a distinct risk

While aiel are supposed to be pale of skin, they spend a lot of time in the sun, so I would expect their faces and hands to be tanned. they would be very pale under the cadin'sor.

so you can easily justify a lighter or darker aiel by the amount of sun he's taken.

14 hours ago, DojoToad said:

If they get Aiel fight choreography right, they would have a huge improvement over season 1

season 1 did contain aiel fight coreography, and it was acclaimed as one of the most spectacular moments. they only need to keep doing the same

Ep6 is pretty good. there is some good drama between moiraine and siuan. they presented siuan story well, and that's what Ep6 is about, and it's good.

loial doesn't have much space. pity. he doesn't have much space in the book either, sometimes disappearing for many books. mat leaving in the end is... not the best outcome, but the actor didn't come back and they did what they could with what they had.

i recommended it to a guy i know on the internet, he could not get into it at first because it starts so slow.

but he later gave it another try, and he liked it. that's the conversation on whatsapp

Quote

any news of new season oh wheel of time?

you mean season 2? in 2023, i think
ok
but you said you didn't like it?
 no
 just slow start
 ifound it pretty good and the cgi were not cheap
 i hate b movie cgi
its great

are we getting leaks or sneak peeks from production?

for S1, even in the lulls of activity, we'd still get something once per month. it's been one month since the last officially released snippet.

got screwed up terribly in later seasons. wot is still in time to avoid this fate.

i do believe luck plays a huge role in it.

I mean, there's plenty of good stuff out there. the stuff that gets really popular isn't necessarily the best; i'm not even sure you can define "best" in an objective way. it comes down to circumstances, mostly.

got launched at a time where there was high demand for that kind of content, and very little competition.

wot launched at a time when there was already a high bar set, a lot more competition, and it got crippled by the pandemics.

So elyas was not cut entitely. Sweet!

23 minutes ago, Raal Gurniss said:

So…Fully armoured, wearing articulated gauntlet's she unsheathes a dagger(midfall)  and somehow stabs the sheer ice/rock wall in free fall and stops her plummeting instantly…..And you think thats more plausible?

 

 

look back the scene. she did not unsheate the dagger, she already had it in hand. and she was stationary on the ice wall. she took a jump, and stabbed the ice, stopping there.

unless you are referring to the "pulling it once in an emergency". which yes, i think it's playsible, in the sense that it's not completely impossible. more weird things happened. people have been falling off of a plane and survived. i can accept a freak occurrence happening once, a lot more than i can accept milder stuff happening regularly.

so, i went back and watched the trailer to see the incriminated scene.

there is this girl on an ice cliff, she jumps and stabs the ice with a knife, holding on it.

actually, it's the same climbing style of lara croft

and yes, it is completely irrealistic. I can believe one pulling it of once in an emergency and getting lucky. one systematically climbing this way? no chance.

this has absolutely nothing to do with armor. in fact, she's gripping the knife, so having gauntlets would not hamper grip on that.

I haven't seen the trailer well, but grabbing a ledge while falling is extremely hard anyway. The presence of armor should not be the discriminating factor. If i accept someone grabbing an icy ledge, i also accept doing it in armor

But if we go by realism, rand or lan dueling 5 opponents - competent opponents - is by far more impossible. Yet i don't see people complain of that.

In rythm of war, adolin faces 20 opponents, but they were untrained, disorganized, low in morale, and poorly equipped. Even then, adolin would have lost. And that, i can believe.

Rand standing in the middle of 5 opponents? You can't parry five simultaneously.

12 hours ago, Raal Gurniss said:

Wearing 25-30kg chain and plate armour isn’t going to make climbing an icy sheer slope easy….And the gauntlets would make it next to impossible…..

 

But I will give it a quick gander online and see if I can find any video footage of it happening.

 

 

edit…Nope, seems it’s full steel armour mountain climbing is an extreme sport yet to get mainstream coverage for some reason.

Curious, because it took me half a minute to find it, and i didn't think it was necessary to provide a link

(from 2:00 to 2:20 if you want actual climbing)

though i was specifically mentioning swimming, and general mobility

it didn't take some special search. those are literally the first four videos that popped in my youtube when typing "swimming in armor".

now, if you are asking for the very exact specific conditions of the trailer, the same exact kind of armor, the same exact kind of surface, then no, of course you won't find the very exact thing. but, call me gullible, I see plenty of evidence of people doing something similar enough - or similarly taxing - that I won't question the feasibility of the act just because one is wearing gauntlets instead of being free-handed.

I find it weird that people watch movies with wizards, magical beasts, artifacts of power, dragons, destiny, immortal warriors living for millennia, but they choose to suspend their disbelief over some mildly hard physical feat, just because they find it a lot harder than it actually is.

speaking of ad, am i the only one with the impression that there was virtually no advertising for wot?

actually, I'm not much qualified to tell, because i'm not exposed to much advertising. basically only the one coming on youtube videos and various popup.

but i've only seen the wot trailer as a youtube advertising once.

in the months preceeding the release of dune, i was proposed that trailer virtually every single video. and today, i watched a single 40 min video and i was shown the lotr trailer twice - it's 100% more than the wot trailer already.

If I hadn't known already that wottv was coming out, i'd have missed it entirely.

is that normal? perhaps youtube videos are not a good metric for advertising?

37 minutes ago, Raal Gurniss said:

Watched someone rock climbing in full armour all gauntleted up…..Thats where I stopped watching…

 

I mean its a fantasy genre full of magic and somehow they made things look even more far fetched than the genre can bare…

 

 

actually, that's not irrealistic. it's a lot easier to move in armor than some people think. armor weight less than some climber's backpack, and it's more evenly distributed. there's videos of people swimming in armor. the idea of armor as this bulky, cumbersome stuff that left people unable to move properly is a myth.

Doesn't seem a wot related question, but it relates to the difficulty of adapting.

wot was given a massive budget, great actors, great people, all the production time they needed, the implied promise of up to 8 seasons if everything goes well.

And it was barely adequate.

Despite all the resources put into it, the show was good, but not excellent. And in a lot of cases, it was for the lack of resources. must save money by not making too many sets, must save money by using cgi sparingly, must not hire too many extras to film battles, must cut plots because 64 hours are not enough for the full story.

No, let us not discuss rafe's ability or lack thereof. I'm focusing on all the objective difficulties that made wot extremely hard to adapt.

Well, I like the stormlight archive even more than wot, and I would like an adaptation of that too. but it's gonna be even harder.

to adapt the SA, you need cgi in every single scene; spren are everywhere. you need special sets for every outside; you can't just film in a forest, roshar has an ecology all of its own, you'd need to make models for all the weird plants they have.

makeup would be a nightmare, there are a lot of ethnicities with unique traits.

the plot is slightly less dispersive than wot, but there's still multiple characters and plotlines.

the story is going to be just as long, or possibly longer. SA is bound to stop at 10 books instead of 14, but each one of those books goes well past 1000 pages, while most wot books were around 800. and those pages are more condensed with plot, because sanderson has less flowery descriptions. And with a more cohesive plot, there's less side stories to cut.

So, if it took a major effort to produce a wot series, and it still was barely adequate, i wonder what kind of resources would be needed to try an adaptation of the stormlight archive

9 hours ago, Andra said:

Given the length of the first two books, and the fact that they both came out in the same year, I don't think the ending of the first can really be considered an ending (and no, that's not a play on "there are no endings to ...").  Think of it rather as the middle of a single longer book.

 

Jordan certainly didn't write it like he thought of it as the end of one story and the beginning of another.  It was more like just a trip to the kitchen during the commercial break, then right back into it.

yes and no.

Sure, RJ wanted to write more books. But he had no certainty that further books would be published; that depended on the success of the first So the first book had to be a kind of standalone with some kind of resolution, in order to be published. that is common for every book that begins a trilogy or saga. For movies too; the first always have to be a standalone. think also star wars, where the first movie is a standalone, while later movies can't.

And the tv show also has to make S1 as a standalone. sure, you always hope that it gets renewed, but you are not guaranteed

i wouldn't call it childishness but naiveness. rand knows the forsaken are after him, he's in a strange magic land that can be accessed only by channeling, and in a completely empty world he stumbles on this woman. what are the odds that it's a coincidence? what are the odds that there's something fishy underneath?

on the other hand, rand is ta'veren (and he knows it), and strange things happen around him all the time. so maybe "what are the odds" is not a good question to ask for him, but "why did the pattern send me this way?". 

anyway, he definitely should have been suspicious of something.

20 minutes ago, Andra said:

While that's all certainly possible, one of the things to take into account is that this is a piece of written fiction.  And one of the rules for good writing is, "don't bring it up, if you're not going to use it."  Otherwise known as "Chekov's Gun." (Final Jeopardy response tonight ?).

 

Rafe showed us Moiraine with the sa'angreal in the opener to the first episode.  He showed it to us again right before the Eye.

The implication is that Moiraine knew - at the beginning - that it would be necessary, and that other things wouldn't be.

i disagree. by that reasoning, checkov gun implies that people in stories never take preparations that are not needed.

it is equally plausible that moiraine undertook many other preparations, but since they ended up unnecessary, they were not shown in the movie. just in the same way that we never see people buying food, but the conclusion is not "food pops magically for them", but rather "it's not something that impacts the story"

51 minutes ago, Andra said:

That's one of the possible implications.  That the whole "the Dragon could be a woman" thing was something she knew was BS all along.

how about "she thought so, but wasn't completely sure"?

some people here argue like knowledge is binary, you either know or you don't. and that's not how it works. it's easy to find hints, but very hard to confirm for certain. So, perhaps moiraine had an inkling that the dragon would be a man, but she wasn't sure enough to discard other options entirely?

maybe there was a prophecy saying that, but she wasn't sure it wasn't mistranslated and so she brought all the ta'veren she could find just to be sure?

5 hours ago, Cauthonfan4 said:

That trend is only true if both are of similar quality of shows, and that's just not true.

Your analysis is based on you attempting fo handwave away what you want to handwave away.

 

 

i think you didn't understand my analysis at all, if you think i am trying to handwave stuff away. If you argue with things like the quality of the show, then you didn't understand what a mathematical analysis is about in the first place. You may also have failed to notice that I also infer from the analysis that a fair portion of those 10/10 ratings are fluke. And you also failed to notice that the statistical analysis implied the conclusion that the shows are not of similar qualities; the gaussian curves of the ratings are centered around different values.

My argument is based solely on the statistical distribution of the ratings. You are free to argue the mathematical method, or the psycology of rating people producing an abnormal amount of extreme results, but you certainly cannot disregard mathematics just because you don't like the result.

On 1/26/2022 at 7:49 AM, DaddyFinn said:

IMDb ratings at the moment.

 

WoT

 

Witcher

 

WoT:

7-10 74,2%

1-6 25,8%

 

Witcher:

7-10 88,5%

1-6 11,5%

 

I picked 7-10 as the "good" group because I think 6 is more towards "bad". Interesting how much less Witcher has 1-6 ratings. Is the show actually so good? Is it faithful? Are there less passionate book fans? Less review bombing? Something else? It would be better to compare Witcher season 1 ratings. Are those numbers available anywhere?

 

For me personally, WoT S1 is a ~9/10 but I think that the 7,2 is pretty realistic for the larger audience. I wouldn't expect it to be over 8 after S1.

 

It will be interesting to see where WoT balances out after it has several hundred thousand ratings.

the reason witcher has different distribution is that witcher has over five times more votes than WoT. this averages out most review bombings. you see that the votes follow a gaussian distribution; centered around 8 for WoT, around 9-10 for witcher. but then wot has a huge spike of 10 and 1; most of them were just people who wanted to support or sink the show. they break the gaussian distribution. if we follow the trend, 1 should have 2-2.5% of votes, but it gets a crazy 7%; it means 2% of those 1 are legitimate, 5% are bookcloaks doing their best to sink the ratings.

similarly, perhaps a 10% of the 10s are genuine, and the remaining are wot fans trying to raise the ratings.

the witcher has a similar spike for 1, but it's a lot smaller because it has less votes overall.

witcher has a small spike for 1 ratings, but it's a lot smaller; roughly 1% more than it should be by the gaussian. estimating the excess of 10 is impossible with the data available.

5% of votes for WoT means 4000 votes. 1% for witcher means... still 4000 votes.

so, if my mathematical analysis is correct (numbers don't lie, but the truth they tell is rarely the truth you hear; numbers are much like aes sedai in this regard) there are 4000 angry book fans out there who don't like adaptations and try to review bomb them. in witcher they are less relevant because there are more overall votes.

I also conclude that an honest review - taking away the 1 and 10 that don't fit the gaussian - would improve WoT ratings a bit, to around 7.5-8. Witcher would still stay at over 9, season 1 was very good.

7 hours ago, Cauthonfan4 said:

For season 1 maybe. How many are going to walk away after the awful end of season 1? How many are going ro be pushed away because book fans are out there saying how bad it is compared to the source?

 

on the other hand, there's a few reviews of people who preferred the show to the books. people who couldn't get into the books, but liked the show. I recall a few "my wife didn't like the books, but she liked the show" in this very thread.

and frankly, there's plenty of flaws in the books that people can dislike. I don't think a closer adaptation would have been better received

"this looks like a lotr ripoff"

"everyone is behaving like a caricature when it comes to opposite gender"

"the romances are not believable"

"mat does nothing"

"the main characters take too many dumb decisions for me to care about them"

the show does fix a lot of those problems, while introducing other problems of its own. The overall effect on non-book-fans? I wouldn't be too certain about it.

5 hours ago, Andra said:

River deltas don't "cut through" rock.

Pretty much by definition.

 

They included things in the show that make no sense, because they thought they look good.

Not sure; rivers do form canyon complexes, having one such complex close to the sea may possibly happen under very special circumstances.

But yes, i am well aware movies prioritize what looks cool in the moment over what makes sense. It's one of my main problems with tv in general. I haven't seen a single cultivated field anywhere, and the witcher wasn't better in this regard. Lotr wasn't better. All cities are in the middle of wilderness. I always wonder what people eat

1 hour ago, Deviations said:

Bel tine is in the spring.  'no goodwife would allow bel tine to come without the spring cleaning being done'.

oh, right. But it was uncommonly cold that spring, and there was still snow around in patches:

Quote

For all that spring should have come a good month since, the wind carried an icy chill as if it would rather bear snow

Quote

Scattered white patches of snow still dotted the ground

Both quotes coming from the very first page of the first chapter of teotw.

So, it's not a plot hole that it would snow sometimes during the events in the show. though the unnatural winter is never mentioned once, there's also no indication of warm weather. I only remember alanna wearing a deep neckline, but she was inside the hall of the tower; i don't remember anyone with light clothing outdoors