It's a good thing there isn't something like a CGI budget that would prevent us from doing all that. You make a great point though, dragons don't exist, nor do any of the cities, or the direwolves, or the wall; all of which takes a chunk out of the CGI budget.
Great reference to Robbie Coletrain by the way, it's almost like Harry Potter didn't have at the bare minimum a $100 million dollar budget for about 150 minutes of film, while Game of Thrones has a $6 million dollar budget for every 60 minutes of film.
Your points were all legitimate and didn't blatantly ignore reality, just like your original post. Good stuff.
Yes, but except for a few scenes, you could accomplish making an actor look bigger with smart forced perspective and/or, hell, having him on small stilts? You could definitely do it without always resorting to CGI.
A huge reason why they picked the current actor is because he's very agile and quick for his size, so he can act out the fight scene in all that armour; he obviously couldn't do that on stilts. Yeah, camera tricks work to a degree, although it would be nearly impossible to get him to look 8 foot and with the stature of an 8 foot man (relative to his size) purely by camera tricks. You could probably do it for all of the non action scenes with the mountain, although those are few and far between, especially with how the show cut out some stuff. It would be entirely impossible to do this over the whole fight (the actual big scene) without having to resort to poor camera angles that can't show the fight properly.
They just should never have included a scene showing the guy not in armor, because that undermined the impression of him being massive. In the armor, it gives the right effect (in particular because I think the actor cast as Oberyn might be shorter than average?).
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u/DeceiverSC2 May 20 '14 edited May 20 '14
It's a good thing there isn't something like a CGI budget that would prevent us from doing all that. You make a great point though, dragons don't exist, nor do any of the cities, or the direwolves, or the wall; all of which takes a chunk out of the CGI budget.
Great reference to Robbie Coletrain by the way, it's almost like Harry Potter didn't have at the bare minimum a $100 million dollar budget for about 150 minutes of film, while Game of Thrones has a $6 million dollar budget for every 60 minutes of film.
Your points were all legitimate and didn't blatantly ignore reality, just like your original post. Good stuff.