Interview
Showrunner Ryan Condal addresses complaints that House of The Dragon episodes were too dark to watch
Game of Thrones might have left a bitter taste in the mouths of a lot of fans with its controversial final season. However, the prequel House of The Dragon is trying hard to relive the glory days of the massive franchise, and seems to have been highly successful so far. It has a similar feel to that of Game of Thrones, in terms of cinematography, themes, and brutal and gory action, and yet stands in its own right as a much different story. However, a number of scenes in the prequel show annoyed a lot of fans as it reminded them of the color palette used in the Battle of Winterfell in the final season of Game of Thrones.
House of The Dragon showrunner Ryan Condal recently addressed all of these concerns in an interview with Deadline. He said, “It is a bit of a rite of passage on this show. The difference between making television and making movies is when you make a movie, you calibrate the thing that you’re making, the master file for this idealized movie theater experience. You know it’s going to go into a professionally calibrated environment, run by a professional projectionist on a professional sound system.”
“The problem with making television is you do all of that, you make the show on millions of dollars worth of equipment. You make this perfect file in a perfect environment and on great equipment that’s perfectly calibrated by professionals. And then you release it into the wild, and it goes to different distributors who compress the file differently.”
“Some air it in 4k, some in 10 EP, some over-crank the brightness, some under-crank the brightness, some make the sound different. You’re also releasing it to tens of millions of different television sets that are all different technology, calibrated differently, and set up differently in different viewing environments. It’s almost impossible to account for all those variables when you’re making the television show. So yes, I heard the note and we’re aware. But I will tell you that it looked phenomenal when we posted it and released it. And it looked great on my television, which has been professionally calibrated. [Laughs].”
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