The Porkchop Express said:
I don't understand why they would make the rings at all if the guy showing them how to make them and having them subcribe to his Tips and Tricks YouTube channel on smithing is Sauron. If I find out the guy helping me make Thanksgiving dinner is a mass murderer, I don't go ahead and use his recipes and ingredients after he runs off.
DTP02 said:JJxvi said:The Porkchop Express said:
I don't understand why they would make the rings at all if the guy showing them how to make them and having them subcribe to his Tips and Tricks YouTube channel on smithing is Sauron. If I find out the guy helping me make Thanksgiving dinner is a mass murderer, I don't go ahead and use his recipes and ingredients after he runs off.
But what if you were going to have to take a permanent vacation to Elvish Florida if you didnt?
Really want to see Elves in jorts now.
Madmarttigan said:
Finally caught up on it. I enjoyed it although the harfoots were again the boring sentimental part.
I don't mind if the wizard is Gandalf, but I don't know anything about the lore so I'm just taking the show at its word and enjoy the story it's presenting.
So the question I have is, did Adar actually know who he is or not? Wonder how the Mordor power dynamic is going to play out if he does actually hate Sauron.
That could actually make for some interesting stories.Madmarttigan said:
Finally caught up on it. I enjoyed it although the harfoots were again the boring sentimental part.
I don't mind if the wizard is Gandalf, but I don't know anything about the lore so I'm just taking the show at its word and enjoy the story it's presenting.
So the question I have is, did Adar actually know who he is or not? Wonder how the Mordor power dynamic is going to play out if he does actually hate Sauron.
AgE2theBONE said:Madmarttigan said:
Finally caught up on it. I enjoyed it although the harfoots were again the boring sentimental part.
I don't mind if the wizard is Gandalf, but I don't know anything about the lore so I'm just taking the show at its word and enjoy the story it's presenting.
So the question I have is, did Adar actually know who he is or not? Wonder how the Mordor power dynamic is going to play out if he does actually hate Sauron.
My impression was that he did not know that Halbrand was Sauron.
It felt like maybe Sauron and Adar had a power play at some point, but Sauron had recognized that he needed to break free from whatever form he was in and evolve to something more, given what Adar said about him trying to achieve the power and failing over and over. So if they get into some sort of fight and Sauron lets Adar kill him, so he get to that next higher form, it would make sense that AdarAgE2theBONE said:Madmarttigan said:
Finally caught up on it. I enjoyed it although the harfoots were again the boring sentimental part.
I don't mind if the wizard is Gandalf, but I don't know anything about the lore so I'm just taking the show at its word and enjoy the story it's presenting.
So the question I have is, did Adar actually know who he is or not? Wonder how the Mordor power dynamic is going to play out if he does actually hate Sauron.
My impression was that he did not know that Halbrand was Sauron.
Or Single Ladies (Put a Ring on It), by Beyonce.The Porkchop Express said:It felt like maybe Sauron and Adar had a power play at some point, but Sauron had recognized that he needed to break free from whatever form he was in and evolve to something more, given what Adar said about him trying to achieve the power and failing over and over. So if they get into some sort of fight and Sauron lets Adar kill him, so he get to that next higher form, it would make sense that AdarAgE2theBONE said:Madmarttigan said:
Finally caught up on it. I enjoyed it although the harfoots were again the boring sentimental part.
I don't mind if the wizard is Gandalf, but I don't know anything about the lore so I'm just taking the show at its word and enjoy the story it's presenting.
So the question I have is, did Adar actually know who he is or not? Wonder how the Mordor power dynamic is going to play out if he does actually hate Sauron.
My impression was that he did not know that Halbrand was Sauron.
1) Doesn't recognize him
2) Goes bezerk when people think he is Sauron
3) Really only cares about getting the orcs (his 'children') their new home
But clearly Adar was carrying out Sauron's plan to create Mordor, thinking it was for him and his people. Just like the Elves think they're the ones who came up with the way to craft their rings, even though Sauron's fingerprints are all over it.
It's basically the same thing happening twice. Sauron influences someone, then gets killed/gets revealed, and then the person who he was at odds with does what he wants them to do anyways. Adar does the steps necessary to erupt Mt. Doom and create Mordor, the Elves use Sauron's techniques to create the rings, with him knowing he'll be able to bind them to the One Ring when he makes it.
Hopefully Season 2 opens with Sauron making the ring in Mt Doom in a montage sequence set to "Ramble On" by Led Zepplin.
Or this.Faustus said:Or Single Ladies (Put a Ring on It), by Beyonce.The Porkchop Express said:
Hopefully Season 2 opens with Sauron making the ring in Mt Doom in a montage sequence set to "Ramble On" by Led Zepplin.
Jokes continued for the forging,
Heart of Gold by Neil Young
Ring of Fire covered by Social Distortion, because Sauron is evil and would use covers
I found myself humming the opening credits song the other morning. Music was a blast. Do we know anything about Season 2 filming or release date?Beat40 said:
Dropping this here for you guys:
Spotify:
https://open.spotify.com/album/4zZuch6tto3R0TMzcAn0oc?si=X2KFjfJlQMG152ze9mqqCw
YouTube:
Honestly, I think they did an amazing job with the music for this show.
Durin IV might be my favorite track.
All of the Numenor tracks are really, really good.
A fun listen while you're working!
The Porkchop Express said:I found myself humming the opening credits song the other morning. Music was a blast. Do we know anything about Season 2 filming or release date?Beat40 said:
Dropping this here for you guys:
Spotify:
https://open.spotify.com/album/4zZuch6tto3R0TMzcAn0oc?si=X2KFjfJlQMG152ze9mqqCw
YouTube:
Honestly, I think they did an amazing job with the music for this show.
Durin IV might be my favorite track.
All of the Numenor tracks are really, really good.
A fun listen while you're working!
redline248 said:
Amazon needs to get these folks on set and hold them there for a year, a la Peter Jackson, and pump the seasons out faster.
Yeah that's a bummer. I watched it with one of my 10 year olds. Who the hell knows what she'll be into at 12 in 2024.Beat40 said:redline248 said:
Amazon needs to get these folks on set and hold them there for a year, a la Peter Jackson, and pump the seasons out faster.
For real - supper bummed we won't get anything in '23.
Beat40 said:
Was thinking about it this morning, and that last episode felt the most to me like a LOTR movie.
I really, really enjoyed that episode!
bobinator said:
Hm, I almost feel the opposite. I think for me the show is maybe TOO dream-like at times. Especially at Numenor.
for a minute I thought I was on the House of the Dragon thread and was like wtfThe Porkchop Express said:Yeah that's a bummer. I watched it with one of my 10 year olds. Who the hell knows what she'll be into at 12 in 2024.Beat40 said:redline248 said:
Amazon needs to get these folks on set and hold them there for a year, a la Peter Jackson, and pump the seasons out faster.
For real - supper bummed we won't get anything in '23.
ABATTBQ11 said:
TLDR in LOTR there was a lot of work in post production with accenting or tweaking each scene's color palette to give them more distinct feels based on their in story location. Basically they had a color theme for everywhere (also sometimes action/time dependent).
They can play with the colors and saturation a lot in post production, so what you see is often not close to what was shot. LOTR did a great job with this, and that may be why you get the surreal feeling you do while watching it. Every in story location had its own look and feel added through what colors and hues they wanted to bring forward. In The Shire it was all about the greens and earth tones to create its rural and rustic feel. Rohan accented more golds, yellows, and browns to give it a feeling of horses and plains. Minas Tirith and Gondor had a lot more white and light grey which accented the stonework and more civilized (for lack of a better word) style of Gondor. Mordor obviously got more darker colors. IIRC dark blue was heavily accented in a lot of the nighttime scenes. Some places are brightened from what was shot, others are a little darkened.
This gives everything you see a distinct look and feel, but also gives a bit of a surreal feeling because none of it is natural. It looks real (obviously it is), but at the same time it feels surreal because you don't live life in postcard with saturated colors everywhere.
cbr said:
so interesting topic maybe -
what makes a cgi world 'look' right?
i personally think the LOTR movies did a really good job about half the time. the shire, rohan - absolutely amazing but that was physical sets.
mordor - worked perfectly.
gondor, orthanc - pretty impressive for its day i would say.
balrog scenes - incredible.
stupid bridge collapsing scenes, some of the last battle, fairly weak... rivendell and lorien were a bit cartoony.
so anyway, fast forward - this show seems a little more on the cartoony side, even though it is 20 years more advanced tech.
my personal taste goes more for the real sets, the recent Dune/bladerunner 2049/rogue 1 CGI looks....
how much is talent/budget and how much is style/choice?
I think the fact that the trilogy was shot on film also helps. It has that graininess that modern digital movies don't have.ABATTBQ11 said:
TLDR in LOTR there was a lot of work in post production with accenting or tweaking each scene's color palette to give them more distinct feels based on their in story location. Basically they had a color theme for everywhere (also sometimes action/time dependent).
They can play with the colors and saturation a lot in post production, so what you see is often not close to what was shot. LOTR did a great job with this, and that may be why you get the surreal feeling you do while watching it. Every in story location had its own look and feel added through what colors and hues they wanted to bring forward. In The Shire it was all about the greens and earth tones to create its rural and rustic feel. Rohan accented more golds, yellows, and browns to give it a feeling of horses and plains. Minas Tirith and Gondor had a lot more white and light grey which accented the stonework and more civilized (for lack of a better word) style of Gondor. Mordor obviously got more darker colors. IIRC dark blue was heavily accented in a lot of the nighttime scenes. Some places are brightened from what was shot, others are a little darkened.
This gives everything you see a distinct look and feel, but also gives a bit of a surreal feeling because none of it is natural. It looks real (obviously it is), but at the same time it feels surreal because you don't live life in postcard with saturated colors everywhere.
ABATTBQ11 said:cbr said:
so interesting topic maybe -
what makes a cgi world 'look' right?
i personally think the LOTR movies did a really good job about half the time. the shire, rohan - absolutely amazing but that was physical sets.
mordor - worked perfectly.
gondor, orthanc - pretty impressive for its day i would say.
balrog scenes - incredible.
stupid bridge collapsing scenes, some of the last battle, fairly weak... rivendell and lorien were a bit cartoony.
so anyway, fast forward - this show seems a little more on the cartoony side, even though it is 20 years more advanced tech.
my personal taste goes more for the real sets, the recent Dune/bladerunner 2049/rogue 1 CGI looks....
how much is talent/budget and how much is style/choice?
For me, it's lighting, texture, and integration.
Lighting is really hard between live action and CGI because there's natural lighting in live action that has to be duplicated in CGI. That's difficult because the natural light is bouncing off and diffusing all over the set/location, which is not in the CGI environment. Even if you perfectly place the sources and get their intensities and colors matched, the diffusion is different. To me CGI characters always look oddly lit in relation to their surroundings.
With CGI environments, lighting is also difficult because, again, it isn't natural. It is all calculated by the rendering engine. LOTR's large scenes all looked really natural because they were shot with bigatures (massive, high LOD miniatures). The lighting for these sets probably couldn't be matched by CGI. For the wide angle shots of things like the battle of pellenor fields or the flyover of Isengard, the CGI characters were very small and any lack of detail or lighting problems was imperceptible because it was like looking at a mannequin from really far away. At the end of the day, they hold up really, really well because so much of the shot is natural and the weaknesses of CGI are minimized (no pun intended).
Texture is another. There's a lot of mapping that goes into CGI models to create their surfaces, and the high levels of detail needed for realistic things like skin and fur are resource intensive just to render. Then you you need to add realistic movement. Even for static objects, it's all about the surface textures. A lot of CGI is somewhat simple objects that have photos and textures mapped on top of them. At render time, the render engine can take those and essentially reshape the simpler object with the texture mapping. It's complicated and that's maybe an oversimplification, but that's the ELI5 version. That said, you can only get so detailed doing that. CGI usually looks a little too smooth and clean. Unless you can hide it with low light where having fewer details is less obvious.
Integration is also difficult since CGI is often done in layers. If you watch hand animated films, you can easily differentiate between the stills and the background when anything like a door or leaves or something is going to move because the colors are always slightly off. You get a similar effect when there's multiple background stills that move together to give a sense of changing perspective. The reason is that everything is layered, and CGI gets the same effect. I love the Frozen movies, but I've noticed this effect in them and i can't unsee it. Specifically in Frozen, after Anna falls into the river and is waking through the snow, she just doesn't quite line up with everything. In Frozen II, the end with Elsa on the water nok going down the fjord doesn't quite layer right (to me), you can kind of tell that she's on one layer and the water is on another. It's the same when the water hits her ice wall. The water and wall just look like they're separate, like the water is hitting an invisible wall and the ice wall is just a 2D picture to hide it
This also makes integrating into live action difficult, as you need the CGI to not only match the lighting, but the character or object has to line up with the live action shot (feet on the ground, occluded behind obstacles correctly, etc). Motion capture plays a huge part in getting this right.
ETA LOTR is a master class in special effects and attention to cinematic detail and production. Those movies will probably hold up for decades and age exceptionally well because of all the thought put into them.
ETA2 This may feel more cartoony because there's more CGI. The Hobbit had this problem because it was on such a rushed schedule. There was not enough time to make it the same way as LOTR and much of it was CGI. I think the big differences between LOTR and this and The Hobbit come down to Jackson's use of bigatures and more live action sets, even for large shots.
The music was simply phenominal. And i thought they were good, not criticizing, especially for 2002. And frankly they captured how i imagined it as a kid too reading the books. I was just pointing out imo that they didnt pull these off as well as the other scenes imo. Cartoony was too negative a word.DallasTeleAg said:
I completely disagree on Lothlorien and Rivendell. I thought those sets were brought to life beautifully. They perfectly encapsulated the world.
I didn't read the novels above, but never discount the importance of score even on how we consume the visuals. Just pairing those fantastic visuals with Shore's score put them on another level.
DallasTeleAg said:
but never discount the importance of score even on how we consume the visuals.
Quote:
That told a similar story: 3.1 million households watched the first two episodes of "Rings of Fire" in the first three days, while 4.8 million watched the HBO premier in the same window.
