Source: Helen Sloan/HBO / Helen Sloan/HBO
The water cooler talk of Game Of Thrones‘ epic “The Long Night” episode is still raging, with the awe of the incredible ending to the complaining of the darkness. The visual issues of the brightness became very apparent when CJ McCollum even chimes in on the difficulty of watching it.
Cinematographer Fabian Wagner, famously known for filming the battle sequences of “Hardhome” and “The Battle of The Bastards,” defended his filming for the episode. Aware of the criticism of how dark the battlefield was,, leaving many to be unsure of fates of some characters, Wagner had a reasonable explanation.
“[GoT] has always been a very dark and very cinematic show,” alluding to the episode being compressed by HBO, leading to poorer visual quality on streaming services. He recommends viewers on the second go-round to either watch into a dark setting or adjusting the settings on their TV before watching.
“We tried to give the viewers and fans a cool episode to watch,” Wagner said before reveling further into his work. “I know it wasn’t too dark because I shot it.”
Along with director Miguel Sapochnik and co-creators D.B. Weiss, and David Benioff, Wagner signed off on the camera and lighting shots to make “The Long Night” a nightmarish event, in which it will be dark. Despite shooting the episode through 55 days of night shoots and 82-minutes of exhilarating action, the visuals were still hard on the eyes for a lot of fans. One viewer joked abut how Beric Dondarrion finally served his purpose by lighting up the battle area for her to see:
“A lot of the problem is that a lot of people don’t know how to tune their TVs properly,” Wagner tells Wired. “A lot of people also unfortunately watch it on small iPads, which in no way can do justice to a show like that anyway.”
Game Of Thrones’ Cinematographer Explains Why “The Long Night” Episode Was So Dark was originally published on cassiuslife.com
