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We Continue Lightening "Game of Thrones" Shots So You Can See What's Going On

Uncovering the unseen work of production designer Deborah Riley and her team

By Rain Noe - July 24, 2017

in Furniture Design

[Mild spoilers ahead.] We've once again gone through last night's "Game of Thrones," lightening shots to catch invisible details. The show is broadcast to be so visually dark that it's often impossible to see what's happening on-screen.

As an example, when Euron Greyjoy's ship finally shows up, what I could see on my screen did not compare with the menace communicated by the same shot that I lightened:

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So what else did you miss? For one thing, whatever interior decorator Daenarys hired for Dragonstone should be fired:

"I asked a simple question: Why don't any of these chairs match? Look at the armrests."

"And the backrests are all different. This one behind me has a kind of Arc of Triumph theme."

"You think that's bad? Look at the ugly backrest of my chair."

Speaking of furniture, we see that Ser Jorah Mormont, an anointed (if disgraced) knight, only rates a twin bed and a lame octagonal stool….

"Thank you for asking, but no, it's not comfortable at all."

…whereas Grey Worm, an orphaned Unsullied, not only gets a fancy chair…

"Please don't tell the others that I sleep in quilted pajamas."

…but also gets a full-size bed:

"Did you bring that Brian McKnight CD, by the way?"

Meanwhile, while sailing the Sea of Dorne, the Sand Sisters get hammocks belowdecks, and are sensibly alternating directions in order to facilitate conversation.

"I mean, it's comfortable for like, the first few minutes, but my chiropractor says it's not good for us."

While it's not really "furniture," over at Winterfell we see that they have these outdoor braziers that kind of look like wastebaskets. What's with the spiky protrusions up top, do you reckon that's the designer's way of saying "Hey don't put your hand here, this thing is dangerous"?

"For the last time, no, I don't want to gather around the fire and sing 'doo-wop.'"

Oddly enough the indoor braziers at Winterfell don't have the user-unfriendly spikes, but have four rings by which these can presumably be carried.

"I've already explained myself, Lord Glover. There's no need to light the overhead candles when there's this much sunlight pouring in. Winterfell is, and shall always be, CO2 negative."

The overhead chandeliers back at Dragonstone, meanwhile, have a rather user-unfriendly feature: Downward-pointing metal spikes, just above head level.

"All I'm saying is, it wouldn't kill you to cover the spikes with, like, tennis balls or something. I'm petrified that I'll get too close to the thing and slice my pate open."

The chandelier's designer has also made no provision for catching dripping wax.

"If you guys are going to the kitchen, can you get me a spatula? I want to clean our War Map Table off."

Yellow candles, by the way, seem to be all that people can get in Westeros.

"I know a great many of you have requested the red candles, but as I've said, the Amazon page for them says 'Out of stock, ships in one to two months.'"

And this episode, we were surprised to see that the Citadel Library has parquet floors. We also get a better look at their storage methodology: Scrolls are stored up top, books down below.

"I'm really in the mood to curl up with a good scroll, but they're too high up and I can't be bothered to fetch the ladder…ah, I guess I'll just look through the books."

And we still can't figure out what those chains on the shelves are for.

"Hmm, 'Fifty Shades of Greyscale'…don't think I've read this one before…."

Meanwhile, over at King's Landing, we get a look at the Anti-Dragon Ballistic Missile that Qyburn has been working on (and which was obviously based on Leonardo da Vinci's Giant Crossbow).

"Are you sure da Vinci hasn't patented this? I don't want, like, any legal hassles."

"I assure you, Your Grace, the machine is combat-ready. The only problem is that it takes three men 45 minutes to load it. Also, we forgot to put wheels on it and now it's too heavy to lift up to get the wheels under there."

In any case, we here at Core77 want to shout-out production designer Deborah Riley and all of the unsung folks in the GoT art department. We know that you guys and gals put in a lot of time to create these sets, and we want you to know that we appreciate it, even if we don't get to see it during the original airings.

(Question for fellow viewers: I am watching the show via my HBO Now subscription, and find the images impossibly dark; for those of you watching it on proper cable, are the images any lighter/more easily discernible?)

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Fraser Pyke

7 years ago

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Keep these coming please!
The scenes are as dark as sin.
I always thought my old TV wasn't up to scratch to deliver rich blacks (It isn't) but even my new laptop struggles with the dark scenes. I'm glad to know that I'm not the only one who is squinting every time we have a dark castle interior scene.

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David Beck

7 years ago

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1,000 years pass since the building of their great wall and their technology advancement to kill a dragon is a big cross bow?

Can't figure out gun powder?

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T P

7 years ago

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Might the chains be some form of theft protection? They would rattle as you try to grab a book. Not sure how effective it would be, but of course a library generally is pretty quiet.

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Dominic Brown

7 years ago

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That ‘giant crossbow’ is a ballista, an ancient weapon widely used by the Romans among others. They came in different sizes, and usually fired a wooden missile with a metal head—metal being far too costly to use for the entire shaft. The one in the show seems to use bending in the arms to store energy, though—the Roman ones had stiff, straight arms that didn’t bend much, embedded in vertical skeins of fibre that twisted and stretched to store energy. The Legions used to choose musically talented men for ballista crews—they balanced the two skeins by twanging them and matching the notes, as though tuning a guitar. The fibre in the skeins was usually animal tendon, though there’s a story that at one siege, the women of the town volunteered to cut off their hair to be woven into torsion springs for the ballistae—probably apocryphal, as human hair has lousy strain-energy storage.

I suppose it may encourage Cersei to find that the weapon can penetrate a dragon’s skull…a dried-up skeletal one, rotting for centuries in a cellar…fired at point-blank range, with no scaly hide protecting it, and of course neither moving (much less flying) nor breathing fire at the operators. I’m not so sure it’ll do as well in actual combat against a magical monster the size of a bus. A bit like shooting at an elephant, say. You really want that first shot to do the job, because your target won’t give you much leisure for a second one. Old time elephant hunters used double rifles for exactly this reason—I wonder if that’s why the ballista seems to have two bows?

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- Dominic Brown
  
  Dominic Brown
  
  7 years ago
  
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  Now that I think about it, a ballista that doesn’t have skeins, but a bending bow, is in fact a giant crossbow. Kindly ignore those scare-quotes around the term; it’s fine.
  
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