S05E09: The Dance of Dragons - Have NOT read the books

gazzamc

Sergio Georgini wrote: »

Why is it so hard to believe that the unsullied could be taken by surprise and outnumbered? Seems everyone is freaking out about it, when it still happens to the most elite and technologically advanced troops in the world today versus much lesser opponents who have rudimentary training and local knowledge.

What exactly do you expect of them?

We expect them to kill at least a few before dying haha they look like they haven't fought a day in their lives..

I understand that their spearman but the guy fighting Jorah was 100x better than them and he was a slave.

gazzamc

gazzamc wrote: »

We expect them to kill at least a few before dying haha they look like they haven't fought a day in their lives..

I understand that their spearman but the guy fighting Jorah was 100x better than them and he was a slave.

They did kill a few. And some were taken by surprise and stabbed in the back etc from what I recall.

Also Jorah was fighting trained fighters who had obviously been through all of the preliminary fights and qualifiers - one of them seemed to be a Bravosi water dancer. They would have been some of the best fighters in the pits.

senordingdong

loyatemu wrote: »

Presumably Stannis is finally going to reach Winterfell so we can expect a sticky end for him or the Boltons or both.]

Or all of the above.
The witch only said that she saw the Bolton banner torn down from winterfell, she didn't specify that it was Stannis who beat them.
But rather than kill off Stannis, I'd say he will continue down this path and the audience will grow to hate him.

nxbyveromdwjpg

Adamocovic wrote: »

Maybe after losing most of my favorite characters it has made me grow fond of Daario without realising, potentially becoming one of my new favorites.. and with that sentence I have just condemned him to imminent torture and/or death! :pac::pac:

Hopefully.

He's ****.

A Brad Maddox Guy

gazzamc wrote: »

We expect them to kill at least a few before dying haha they look like they haven't fought a day in their lives..

I understand that their spearman but the guy fighting Jorah was 100x better than them and he was a slave.

The unsullied & everybody's reaction to them this year reminds me of the Vietnam War. They're fighting in a new environment against a well oiled guerrilla outfit who know the streets & can blend in with the civilians. Like the US, the Unsullied are superior soldiers but when you don't know who your enemy is or where they're coming from next then it's incredibly difficult to defeat them (this is also one of the things which make Littlefinger so dangerous imo; nobody else in Westeros realises he's their enemy to begin with).

Also Meereen is huge; the Unsullied are likely operating many patrols in small numbers to guard as much of the city as they can whereas the Harpies are able to concentrate their attacks in quick bursts & large numbers and know every route of escape before adequate backup can arrive.

Also the guy fighting Jorah was a trained fighter from Bravos; even the other guy in the pit knew he was better off stabbing him the back & going 1-on-1 with Jorah than letting Jorah die first.

lbj666

senordingdong wrote: »

Or all of the above.
The witch only said that she saw the Bolton banner torn down from winterfell, she didn't specify that it was Stannis who beat them.
But rather than kill off Stannis, I'd say he will continue down this path and the audience will grow to hate him.

Can anyone recall what Mellisandres visions in the fire have been in the show. I don't want to google it cause there are still spoilers about.

What did she see before the shadow baby
What did she see from burning the leaches.

I know the most recent one has been the great battle in the snow

DeVore

Yeah, I'm not a huge Dario fan... he's a bit too much in love with himself for my tastes.

duploelabs

MakeEmLaugh wrote: »

Yes, I'm aware this may sound ridiculous considering the show has depicted mutilation, torture, rape and child murder before.

But incest is a game for all, right????

DoYouEvenLift

loyatemu wrote: »

Presumably Stannis is finally going to reach Winterfell so we can expect a sticky end for him or the Boltons or both.

Merys Trant will probably get his comeuppance too (but not before they reveal that he really killed JFK, and was also Jack the Ripper and the guy who invented "New Coke")

At some point the Mountain will reappear too, or whatever Qyburn has turned him into. Considering how the special effects have been in the last 2 episodes I'm expecting him to look like this:

I didn't think the CGI was too bad except for the scenes of daenerys flying on the dragon, that looked like something that belonged on SciFi lol. For a TV show the CGI is, for the most part, excellent but obviously they could do with spending a bit more time and money on it. If they're going to be doing more IMAX screenings each year then I'd hope they'd sort these kind of scenes because it'd really take you out of the experience seeing that on a big screen.

gazzamc

A Brad Maddox Guy wrote: »

The unsullied & everybody's reaction to them this year reminds me of the Vietnam War. They're fighting in a new environment against a well oiled guerrilla outfit who know the streets & can blend in with the civilians. Like the US, the Unsullied are superior soldiers but when you don't know who your enemy is or where they're coming from next then it's incredibly difficult to defeat them (this is also one of the things which make Littlefinger so dangerous imo; nobody else in Westeros realises he's their enemy to begin with).

Also Meereen is huge; the Unsullied are likely operating many patrols in small numbers to guard as much of the city as they can whereas the Harpies are able to concentrate their attacks in quick bursts & large numbers and know every route of escape before adequate backup can arrive.

Also the guy fighting Jorah was a trained fighter from Bravos; even the other guy in the pit knew he was better off stabbing him the back & going 1-on-1 with Jorah than letting Jorah die first.

That makes sense.. It could also come down to her having no commander since Ser Barristan was killed off.. Btw I was talking about the guy who he fought at the end with a spear as his weapon not the other fella who nearly killed Jorah.

Brendan Filone

I'm bemused at "the CGI looked bad" complaints....compared to what, the five people you saw flying dragons to work this morning?

It wasn't the best ever but 10 years ago if you would have told me a TV show would exist with this budget and production value, and that people would complain about it's CGI, I would have laughed in your face.

duploelabs

Brendan Filone wrote: »

I'm bemused at "the CGI looked bad" complaints....compared to what, the five people you saw flying dragons to work this morning?

No, but when the tone of the foreground is completely mismatched to the background, no matter what the subject is, then it's bad CGI

OleRodrigo

In fairness, flying dragon scenes arent easy to do. They werent great in the Hobbit either, which presumably had a bigger budget.

jamo2oo9

Also, the dragons are the only thing that's being made from CGI. The fighting pits? CGI. King's Landing? CGI. Castle Black? CGI.


GoT does have a fair bit of CGI compared to other TV shows and they are much better than you would get. The reason why the dragon CGI effects looked rather shít was because it didn't blend in correctly to it's background and the clip of Khalessi riding Drogon kinda made it worse. I thought it was grand at the start but once Khalessi hopped on, the CGI went to shít.

Pepe LeFrits

Brendan Filone wrote: »

I'm bemused at "the CGI looked bad" complaints....compared to what, the five people you saw flying dragons to work this morning?

It wasn't the best ever but 10 years ago if you would have told me a TV show would exist with this budget and production value, and that people would complain about it's CGI, I would have laughed in your face.

Me too. Have watched it again and the only shot where it is really noticeable is when they are starting to rise and the floor of the arena is visible behind Dany/Drogon.

mzungu

senordingdong wrote: »

Or all of the above.
The witch only said that she saw the Bolton banner torn down from winterfell, she didn't specify that it was Stannis who beat them.
But rather than kill off Stannis, I'd say he will continue down this path and the audience will grow to hate him.

Thats exactly it, its a vague enough vision to begin with. He is being lead down the garden path and is too blind to see it. He may defeat the Boltons at Winterfell, but they are not his only enemy in that part of town. Brienne will be gunning for him as soon as he arrives, except he won't see her as a threat. Not even sure if he is aware she exists.

J. Marston

Remember Littlefinger will be waiting with the Knights of the Vale to pick off the Winner of Bolton vs Baratheon.

senordingdong

mzungu wrote: »

Thats exactly it, its a vague enough vision to begin with. He is being lead down the garden path and is too blind to see it. He may defeat the Boltons at Winterfell, but they are not his only enemy in that part of town. Brienne will be gunning for him as soon as he arrives, except he won't see her as a threat. Not even sure if he is aware she exists.

A fair point. You've given lots to think about with Brienne.
While I don't see Stannis taking winterfell, I don't see him getting killed off either.

Skylinehead

J. Marston wrote: »

Remember Littlefinger will be waiting with the Knights of the Vale to pick off the Winner of Bolton vs Baratheon.

He'll have to do that teleport thing again!

Degag

A lot being talked about CGI and the cost of it. Could anyone explain why it is so costly?

seligehgit

Absolutely loving Game of Thrones,it's like a proverbial game of chess with all the different storylines.I've not a notion who's going to seize the Iron Throne?.... Daenrys with her dragons,Stannis is looking less likely by the day,he is going crazier than the Mad King and is'nt thinking straight with that wicked Red Woman temptress leading him up the garden path.

The Boltons are a little too small time!The Lannisters appear to be losing their grip on the Iron Throne.One of the Stark's Bran,Sansa,hardly Arya.....I'd love to see the honourable character of them all Jon Snow win the day but he'll probably be butchered by that young fellow or the Whitewalkers who'll take over the world!!!Ultimate showdown the dragons vs the whitewalkers!!Littlefinger is the dark horse me thinks.

As has been mentioned 10 episodes per season is not enough to satisfactorily cover the various strands of this ultimate game of chess.

gazzamc

Degag wrote: »

A lot being talked about CGI and the cost of it. Could anyone explain why it is so costly?

It usually comes down to man hours & equipment.. I could be wrong though :P

Mormegil

J. Marston wrote: »

Remember Littlefinger will be waiting with the Knights of the Vale to pick off the Winner of Bolton vs Baratheon.

Well that was what he told Cersei he was going to do, doesn't mean he ever actually intended to do it.

Especially after Cersei was imprisoned.

LF is probably still in King's Landing making lots of new deals with people not named Lannister.

lbj666

senordingdong wrote: »

A fair point. You've given lots to think about with Brienne.
While I don't see Stannis taking winterfell, I don't see him getting killed off either.

Ya things don't really pans out as a straight one on one matchup in Game of Thrones. A few battles aside we were all ready for proper fistycuffs from Robbs army and the lannisters and it never really happend obviously.

There are so many moving parts at winterfell between

Stannis, Mellisandre , Ser Davos at the wall ( probably not getting what he came looking for) , Roose , Roose's child in walda , Ramsey , Sansa , Brienne wanting Stannis dead but Sansa free'd , Theon, Ramsey's psycho mistress.

Its not going to be a straight up seige that for sure,

mzungu

Degag wrote: »

A lot being talked about CGI and the cost of it. Could anyone explain why it is so costly?

http://www.quora.com/Why-is-CGI-effects-so-expensive

Brief outline of the expenses involved here:

People
Contrary to what a lot of people outside the business think, the VFX industry (high end VFX anyway) does not work like IT Services where you assign one module (shot) to an individual and they deliver a finished product which is integrated into the final release (reel) after passing testing. A better analogy is that of a factory assembly line. Rough shots enter at one end and go through a number of stages (Modeling, BgPrep, Dust Busting, Tracking, Animation, Lighting, FX, Compositing etc.) An average shot (of say 5 seconds) is often worked on by 10 - 12 people, each of whom devote AT LEAST 4 weeks (if not more) each on it. That's around 160 * 10 = 1600 person hours minimum (assuming zero overtime...a hopelessly optimistic scenario!) At $50/hr, that's $80K....for one shot. Given that your average tentpole production these days has 15 - 20 minutes of VFX, that's around 20million on VFX artists alone

In addition you have people responsible for keeping the assembly line (called the Production Pipeline) ticking, make sure that the IT systems, render farms and networks are working etc. And that does not even count support functions like Accounting, HR etc. An average production lasts 1.5 - 2 years these days so the total costs of these resources can easily account for another $10 million - odd


Compute & Storage Resources
VFX is compute intensive. A single VFX frame can take upto 12 hours to render depending on complexity. There are 45 frames in a second so that's 540 compute hours for a SINGLE interation of a SINGLE second of VFX. Most shots see at least 20 iterations so make that 10.800 computer hours.

Now, building and running a render farm which can churn out this much compute power is not cheap. Even if you're running your Datacenter at Amazon levels of scale and efficiency (most studios are not and cannot), a single hour of compute will cost you around $0.65 (that's the current price of a GPU instance at AWS) so 1 second of VFX = $7000. Extrapolate to that 20 minutes of VFX we talked about above and you are looking at a little less than $10million. In reality, this cost will be closer to $20 - $25 million.

At this point, the accounting experts will probably be exclaiming, "Wait this is just Opex, what about Capex?" And you're absolutely right, this is purely Operating cost. I'm not even considering the Capital expenditure involved in deploying and maintaining a large render farm

Now, let's talk storage. A single interation of a single frame takes around 100MB or so. That's around 5GB per second. Multiply that by 20 iterations and it's 100GB/second or 12TB per show. Studios also need to maintain backups of all this data. It's difficult to put a dollar value on how much this kind of storage costs ( depends on the kind of tech you use and the tradeoffs you are willing to live with) but suffice to say that it is not trivial. For the purposes of this question, let's run with a cost of $20million (again, the Accounting hawks will complain that this is Capex and should not be accounted as Opex...humor me on this!)

Now, let's add all this stuff together. You get a nice round figure of $70 million.

Still think VFX is Expensive?

Fun fact. A VFX studio runs on Margins of 4 - 5% in a good year. That's contribution margin (Revenue - Variable Cost). EBIT would probably be -2% or worse. Put another way, you'd get a better rate of return if your parked your cash in US Treasury Bills...at exponentially lower risk!

PressRun

seligehgit wrote: »

Absolutely loving Game of Thrones,it's like a proverbial game of chess with all the different storylines.I've not a notion who's going to seize the Iron Throne?.... Daenrys with her dragons,Stannis is looking less likely by the day,he is going crazier than the Mad King and is'nt thinking straight with that wicked Red Woman temptress leading him up the garden path.

The Boltons are a little too small time!The Lannisters appear to be losing their grip on the Iron Throne.One of the Stark's Bran,Sansa,hardly Arya.....I'd love to see the honourable character of them all Jon Snow win the day but he'll probably be butchered by that young fellow or the Whitewalkers who'll take over the world!!!Ultimate showdown the dragons vs the whitewalkers!!Littlefinger is the dark horse me thinks.

As has been mentioned 10 episodes per season is not enough to satisfactorily cover the various strands of this ultimate game of chess.

When I think about the threat of the white walkers, it kind of makes me feel like the likes of Littlefinger are irrelevant in the face of something like that, but then I remember that of any character in the show, I probably shouldn't underestimate Littlefinger.

Useful.Idiot

Most people seem to be going by the gut reaction to Stannis' burning Shireen and not considering the wider context of the act. In my opinion, his latest actions make him the most selfless character on the show. None of Stannis' actions are motivated by ambition or greed or power. He does what he does as he believes he alone has a duty to the save the realm and he will sacrifice anything to do this.

So far every time he has trusted Melisandre and her magic she has seemingly come through for him. Stannis is initially aggressive against her for suggesting burning Shireen but after his armies supplies are destroyed Stannis sees he no longer has a choice if he wants him and his men to survive. He would sacrifice his own daughter whom he loves in order to save the lives of many thousands more in future conflict to come. It was a complete Stannis move.

We've yet to see how far in the game Stannis is actually going to get or whether he actually is AA but I think he'll be able to conquer Winterfell at least. His trait of having an unbreakable iron and just resolve is only enforced by his latest actions.

senordingdong

J. Marston wrote: »

Remember Littlefinger will be waiting with the Knights of the Vale to pick off the Winner of Bolton vs Baratheon.

It may well be the lords of the vale who 'tear down the Bolton banner'.

PressRun

Useful.Idiot wrote: »

Most people seem to be going by the gut reaction to Stannis' burning Shireen and not considering the wider context of the act. In my opinion, his latest actions make him the most selfless character on the show. None of Stannis' actions are motivated by ambition or greed or power. He does what he does as he believes he alone has a duty to the save the realm and he will sacrifice anything to do this.

So far every time he has trusted Melisandre and her magic she has seemingly come through for him. Stannis is initially aggressive against her for suggesting burning Shireen but after his armies supplies are destroyed Stannis sees he no longer has a choice if he wants him and his men to survive. He would sacrifice his own daughter whom he loves in order to save the lives of many thousands more in future conflict to come. It was a complete Stannis move.

We've yet to see how far in the game Stannis is actually going to get or whether he actually is AA but I think he'll be able to conquer Winterfell at least. His trait of having an unbreakable iron and just resolve is only enforced by his latest actions.

I don't think anyone is denying that Stannis believes he's the chosen one or whatever. I think people are just doubting whether what he believes is actually true or if he's just being taken for a ride. To me, Stannis' story is playing out like a tragedy. He's going to make all these sacrifices only to realize that Melisandre has pulled a fast one on him.

Useful.Idiot

PressRun wrote: »

I don't think anyone is denying that Stannis believes he's the chosen one or whatever. I think people are just doubting whether what he believes is actually true or if he's just being taken for a ride. To me, Stannis' story is playing out like a tragedy. He's going to make all these sacrifices only to realize that Melisandre has pulled a fast one on him.

Yeah but the reactions of some suggest that in doing this he's pure evil and he deserves whatever he's going to get in the future even though his pursuit of the good of the realm makes him one of the most righteous characters in the show, in a way.I agree that it is playing out like a tragedy and that its quite likely that he will fail but I still admire his resolve. I think Melisandre actually believes what she says she believes but sure who knows.