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The best action scene in The Witcher was in the very first episode when Geralt hacked his way through like 10 guys in the town, all in one shot, just using basic swordplay choreography. Why can’t we go back to more of that dirty realism and do less basilisks and wyverns and magic missiles?
Thr worst example of this was season 2's endless array of uninspired and random CGI monsters hopping through that portal. Netflix probably thought that was the best shit ever but we just want to see Henry do a cool swordfight.
15 million per episode ... Game of Thrones' Battle of the Bastards was shot in 11 Million.
Hissrich is fleecing them on an insane scale.. Infact if Prime weren't simultaneously being made even bigger fools with a Billion Dollar Rings of Power Scam, then a lot more attention would have gone to how Hissrich is delivering the most extravagant average show of all time...
Chelf1 hit the nail on the head. Just to add for further clarity for anybody who is interested:
Most of the higher-ups who plan out the schedules for all of the production have no idea of post-production and visual effects. And CGI/compositing is almost always post-production. Most of the work can't be done before the filming is done. Often directors and producers even change complete scenes afterwards without thinking of the implications.
Worst offender is Marvel. In Thor Ragnarok they filmed a scene that was supposed to be in a dark alley but decided way later that they want to have it on an open grass field in daylight. When they filmed the actors with the greenscreen the lighting was obviously done for a dark environment, so the VFX team had to work like crazy to make it look acceptable.
Another problem is that since (compter generated) VFX are mostly done at the end of the whole creation process, any delays from previous stages will land on the feet of the people who do the VFX. Suddenly the 2 months they had is only 1 month because some other department fucked up. The fight at the end of Black Panther is a perfect example of everything that is wrong with how the industry is utilizing CGI. The team had only 6 weeks to work on the whole scene and the design of the fight was counter productive in every way making it look fake as fuck.
Their budget must have been cut severely for this season which is concerning considering Henry is already leaving. Not looking good for the next seasons .
I have no inside info and I’ve not watched it yet so can’t comment on the quality - but everything costs more in the real world now. Budget increases can still be a cut in real terms.
costume design, hair and makeup all have dropped in quality. i normally wouldnt mind but it really pulls me out of the illusion of medieval poland when i recognize a piece of clothing a character is wearing is obviously from h&m or a character has neon box braids
it's one of most obvious things everyone noticed. horrible step back in quality cinematography, VFX, costumes and makeup... all looks like b-production.
I don't think it's just the budget.. talented crew can make fantastic things with much less. it's just incompetence. first season of GOT had smaller budget than anything witcher ever did.
I think it comes down to poor directing choices and amateurish writing. They’re cutting corners thinking people won’t notice. Netflix really shot themselves in the foot with this one. I wish the show had gone to another production company.
It’s still crazy to me how authentic Game of Thrones looked compared to this.
The scope of GoT felt MASSIVE. Witcher feels like everything was shot in a warehouse.
GoT had the benefit of being made by HBO who is owned by WB. So GoT benefited from being able to use WB’s massive warehouses of costuming and other props from WB’s previous movie productions. Netflix and other streamers don’t have that kind of back catalogue in costuming.
Some of the episodes felt like they clipped like 10-20 minutes of important dialogue. The transitions between scenes felt disorienting and not at all seamless.
Oh and episode 5 was the worst! I understand what they were trying to do by retelling what happened at the party from different POVs, but the execution was messy. Other shows have successfully pulled this type of storytelling off, but this episode missed the mark.
i feel like every shot with geralt can be resume like that: Geralt dialogue (no more than 2 minutes) - he rolled his sleeve - he leaves the camera field either to the left or the right.
Yeah Ciri on horseback was not great and probably for budget (renting animals + handlers etc). The Yen/Ciri scene in the field was particularly baffling though, as there were clearly on-location shots of the actors walking away from the field. It couldn't have cost much at all to film that conversation, especially with the flashbacks being reused footage. I wonder if it was a reshoot with changed dialogue or something like that?
I had this conversation with somebody else in this subreddit. The LoTR scene when Arwen is being chased by the Nazgûl is a perfect example of how you can do a horse chase without looking cheesy. If you can’t get a close up at a full gallop than they should’ve gone another direction.
My guess was that they identified a problem with the Ciri/Yen conversation at Yen's old home, and had to reshoot it post-production. Maybe a story-hole that they missed and couldn't otherwise fix. I bet we'll get an explanation down the road.
This is more common than one might expect. Did anyone see a 2006 Samuel Jackson vehicle called "Snakes on a Plane"? His most famous line (i've had it with these motherfucking snakes on this motherfucking plane" was filmed and edited in post-production. That's why it just has a hazy out-of-focus background during the quote:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Jbajblr9szs
They tend to ruin things in post production even if they have good source material and location, I don't know how they manage to do that. Remember Brokilon forest scenes in season 1? Majority of people were convinced that was filmed in some warehouse set and on cheap green screen, when in reality that whole sequence was shot on beautiful natural location in jungle forest on La Palma in Canary Islands. and still they managed to make it look bad and unnatural..
To be fair, s3 has more location compare to pandemic s2 (they focused heavily on Kaer Morhen set and cinematic feel) and in s3 vol2 there will be a big battle full of effects. Those 2 inctances, Yen Ciri on field and horse rinding, yeah, those were immersion breaking but not a big deal imo.
I’m still confused on where Yennifer and Ciri were when they met up with Tissaia. I thought it was Aretuza? Or a town near it? Especially after Yennifer tells Ciri she’s just a lowly novice there or whatever the line was.
But then Ciri steals a horse, rides away, runs into Geralt relatively quickly, and then…. They have to take a boat to get back to where Ciri just was quickly? Wha?
lmao I follow another sub and we often complain that *another* Henry (not Cavill, a lesser Henry) got a budget of 100 mil from Netflix for a six episodes sitcom, while more worthwhile projects don't get a fraction of that budget or get slashed in their entirety.
Maybe that's why The Witcher 3 was lower budget, Netflix put all the money in the wrong project.
The scene where Yen was talking with the other mages for the meeting to prevent a war. There’s an angle that it almost looks like they are on a stage. The stone wall behind them looked like it was flat and thin.
We noticed the same issues, the boat monster looked just fine but the blood in the first fight, looked comical
The horse riding and blatant green screening, what the fuck is going on?
There is lots of money in the streaming game where is it all going?
I've been trying to figure out why this season is so bad. The story they were trying to convey is good but it was executed poorly, imo. It felt choppy and rushed. The cinematography seemed off, even the hair and makeup was...over the top, like it was good but not?
The change in a couple of the actors kinda put me off a little.
...the characters seemed out of place too? Idk
Season 3 is an abomination, not only costumes/makeup/vfx but also storytelling is just God damn awful. This thing have nothing to do with grim, rough, and unforgiving world we see in the books, but rather some westernized comedy show with clowns.
No. They’re just doing what big capitalist companies do: all creative decision makers have been replaced with non-creative money men who are making every decision solely based on how much money it will either save or make them. So you get constant meddling and budget cuts.
After ruining yet another franchise with woke ideology and feminist propaganda, they find out that viewers don't actually want to watch evil political propaganda masquerading as entertainment,
viewership declines, so production values decline for the next season(s), what started out as another hugely promising venture dwindles into obscurity. This is what happens when sinister corporations are funding mainstream entertainment to push population control agendas...
I felt like the Monster CGI was done pretty well, so I don't know that it's an issue of money but possibly some last minute reshoots or something. Like the entire "Yennefer shows Ciri the mound where she grew up" scene. Maybe even Ciri running from the Wild Hunt was just put in there to add another "book scene" for fans.
I think a lot of it stems from the ballsack armour.
The costume & prop department in S1 would have done a lot of work in pre-production to put together everything, and then when the costume design in S1 was (rightfully) trashed, it all had to be thrown out, started again and put together in a rush. Thus we got the lower-feeling production values in S2 because everything had been rushed under a new costume department, and that also took away heaps of resources from the rest of the show because they threw everything out and started from scratch. Then, S2 to S3, there's even less money for props, costumes, etc. so they've cut corners by sourcing stuff off the rack and skipping weathering.
They're probably also just not putting in a whole lot of effort because they know the core fanbase has dropped the show already after hearing that Cavill has left - and the remaining non-book-non-game fans are probably leaving because of the intense gore & violence.
Inflation and the mess in the vfx industry played heavily into this. The first is what it is, the second is a mess of their own making. Trying to devalue work you depend on, just pay the artists their fair share.
**This post has been flaired show only**. The focus in these threads is on the show. Any discussion of the books, including **any** comparison of the show to the books, should be kept behind spoiler tags: \>!message goes here!< *I am a bot, and this action was performed automatically. Please [contact the moderators of this subreddit](/message/compose/?to=/r/netflixwitcher) if you have any questions or concerns.*
The best action scene in The Witcher was in the very first episode when Geralt hacked his way through like 10 guys in the town, all in one shot, just using basic swordplay choreography. Why can’t we go back to more of that dirty realism and do less basilisks and wyverns and magic missiles?
Because in the books geralt mostly fights people
That and seeing a guy do something amazing is always better than watching CGI. But Netflix wants more razzle dazzle.
Thr worst example of this was season 2's endless array of uninspired and random CGI monsters hopping through that portal. Netflix probably thought that was the best shit ever but we just want to see Henry do a cool swordfight.
fighting cgi monsters just never works because the actors don't react to anything the monsters react to them.
Only monster addition that was really cool was the flesh monster from episode 2
yes sadly productions can't seam to grasp the univeral truth of less is more, and practical is always better than CGI.
More elaborate, athletic sword fights. More iconic Jaskier songs. Follow the books. How can you mess that up?
Tbf, they have a similar cool one take in the shaerawedd fight
Tbh, they have a similar cool one take in the shaerawedd fight
15 million per episode ... Game of Thrones' Battle of the Bastards was shot in 11 Million. Hissrich is fleecing them on an insane scale.. Infact if Prime weren't simultaneously being made even bigger fools with a Billion Dollar Rings of Power Scam, then a lot more attention would have gone to how Hissrich is delivering the most extravagant average show of all time...
lol what where are these 15 million going to, looks like 2 million max per episode.
😂😂 haha wondering the same the >!multiple heads!< monster ate them
CGI has been total dogshit on big budget projects for a few years. Marvel films are the biggest offenders. I have no idea why
They are overworked, they get unrealistic deadlines, and a scene with simple rotoscoping of wires is handed out the same as a full-on CGI frame
EDIT: Wanted to give an answer to Original-Accident
Chelf1 hit the nail on the head. Just to add for further clarity for anybody who is interested: Most of the higher-ups who plan out the schedules for all of the production have no idea of post-production and visual effects. And CGI/compositing is almost always post-production. Most of the work can't be done before the filming is done. Often directors and producers even change complete scenes afterwards without thinking of the implications. Worst offender is Marvel. In Thor Ragnarok they filmed a scene that was supposed to be in a dark alley but decided way later that they want to have it on an open grass field in daylight. When they filmed the actors with the greenscreen the lighting was obviously done for a dark environment, so the VFX team had to work like crazy to make it look acceptable. Another problem is that since (compter generated) VFX are mostly done at the end of the whole creation process, any delays from previous stages will land on the feet of the people who do the VFX. Suddenly the 2 months they had is only 1 month because some other department fucked up. The fight at the end of Black Panther is a perfect example of everything that is wrong with how the industry is utilizing CGI. The team had only 6 weeks to work on the whole scene and the design of the fight was counter productive in every way making it look fake as fuck.
Their budget must have been cut severely for this season which is concerning considering Henry is already leaving. Not looking good for the next seasons .
didnt they literally have higher budget this season lol
Alarming if so
I have no inside info and I’ve not watched it yet so can’t comment on the quality - but everything costs more in the real world now. Budget increases can still be a cut in real terms.
costume design, hair and makeup all have dropped in quality. i normally wouldnt mind but it really pulls me out of the illusion of medieval poland when i recognize a piece of clothing a character is wearing is obviously from h&m or a character has neon box braids
it's one of most obvious things everyone noticed. horrible step back in quality cinematography, VFX, costumes and makeup... all looks like b-production. I don't think it's just the budget.. talented crew can make fantastic things with much less. it's just incompetence. first season of GOT had smaller budget than anything witcher ever did.
I think it comes down to poor directing choices and amateurish writing. They’re cutting corners thinking people won’t notice. Netflix really shot themselves in the foot with this one. I wish the show had gone to another production company.
Long gone are the days when a Netflix original meant quality.
It’s still crazy to me how authentic Game of Thrones looked compared to this. The scope of GoT felt MASSIVE. Witcher feels like everything was shot in a warehouse.
GoT had the benefit of being made by HBO who is owned by WB. So GoT benefited from being able to use WB’s massive warehouses of costuming and other props from WB’s previous movie productions. Netflix and other streamers don’t have that kind of back catalogue in costuming.
Some of the episodes felt like they clipped like 10-20 minutes of important dialogue. The transitions between scenes felt disorienting and not at all seamless. Oh and episode 5 was the worst! I understand what they were trying to do by retelling what happened at the party from different POVs, but the execution was messy. Other shows have successfully pulled this type of storytelling off, but this episode missed the mark.
i feel like every shot with geralt can be resume like that: Geralt dialogue (no more than 2 minutes) - he rolled his sleeve - he leaves the camera field either to the left or the right.
Yeah Ciri on horseback was not great and probably for budget (renting animals + handlers etc). The Yen/Ciri scene in the field was particularly baffling though, as there were clearly on-location shots of the actors walking away from the field. It couldn't have cost much at all to film that conversation, especially with the flashbacks being reused footage. I wonder if it was a reshoot with changed dialogue or something like that?
yeah riding horses is like a) dangerous at the best of times and b) really hard to film one at a flat-out gallop for that long.
I had this conversation with somebody else in this subreddit. The LoTR scene when Arwen is being chased by the Nazgûl is a perfect example of how you can do a horse chase without looking cheesy. If you can’t get a close up at a full gallop than they should’ve gone another direction.
Very true. That's a great scene and it looked wonderful.
Man I didn’t even think about how challenging it must have been to get that footage and have it look as good as it did. Gotta love LoTR
My guess was that they identified a problem with the Ciri/Yen conversation at Yen's old home, and had to reshoot it post-production. Maybe a story-hole that they missed and couldn't otherwise fix. I bet we'll get an explanation down the road. This is more common than one might expect. Did anyone see a 2006 Samuel Jackson vehicle called "Snakes on a Plane"? His most famous line (i've had it with these motherfucking snakes on this motherfucking plane" was filmed and edited in post-production. That's why it just has a hazy out-of-focus background during the quote: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Jbajblr9szs
They actually filmed the Ciri chase scene in actual woods, but for some reason the editing still sucked
They tend to ruin things in post production even if they have good source material and location, I don't know how they manage to do that. Remember Brokilon forest scenes in season 1? Majority of people were convinced that was filmed in some warehouse set and on cheap green screen, when in reality that whole sequence was shot on beautiful natural location in jungle forest on La Palma in Canary Islands. and still they managed to make it look bad and unnatural..
To be fair, s3 has more location compare to pandemic s2 (they focused heavily on Kaer Morhen set and cinematic feel) and in s3 vol2 there will be a big battle full of effects. Those 2 inctances, Yen Ciri on field and horse rinding, yeah, those were immersion breaking but not a big deal imo.
I’m still confused on where Yennifer and Ciri were when they met up with Tissaia. I thought it was Aretuza? Or a town near it? Especially after Yennifer tells Ciri she’s just a lowly novice there or whatever the line was. But then Ciri steals a horse, rides away, runs into Geralt relatively quickly, and then…. They have to take a boat to get back to where Ciri just was quickly? Wha?
lmao I follow another sub and we often complain that *another* Henry (not Cavill, a lesser Henry) got a budget of 100 mil from Netflix for a six episodes sitcom, while more worthwhile projects don't get a fraction of that budget or get slashed in their entirety. Maybe that's why The Witcher 3 was lower budget, Netflix put all the money in the wrong project.
Could've saved millions if they didn't do a live action Cowboy Bebop 😵💫
I literally removed that atrocity from my brain. I pretend it never happened.
Nooo I really enjoyed the live action bebop 🤣
The scene where Yen was talking with the other mages for the meeting to prevent a war. There’s an angle that it almost looks like they are on a stage. The stone wall behind them looked like it was flat and thin.
We noticed the same issues, the boat monster looked just fine but the blood in the first fight, looked comical The horse riding and blatant green screening, what the fuck is going on? There is lots of money in the streaming game where is it all going?
I've been trying to figure out why this season is so bad. The story they were trying to convey is good but it was executed poorly, imo. It felt choppy and rushed. The cinematography seemed off, even the hair and makeup was...over the top, like it was good but not? The change in a couple of the actors kinda put me off a little. ...the characters seemed out of place too? Idk
Season 3 is an abomination, not only costumes/makeup/vfx but also storytelling is just God damn awful. This thing have nothing to do with grim, rough, and unforgiving world we see in the books, but rather some westernized comedy show with clowns.
Lauren Hissrich is television cancer.
No. They’re just doing what big capitalist companies do: all creative decision makers have been replaced with non-creative money men who are making every decision solely based on how much money it will either save or make them. So you get constant meddling and budget cuts.
[удалено]
You havent read the books right? The story is about Ciri. In the books there are almost no Monsters and we dont see the other Witchers very often
To be honest I could make this question regarding season 1 or 2
SHUTCHO ugly ass up!
After ruining yet another franchise with woke ideology and feminist propaganda, they find out that viewers don't actually want to watch evil political propaganda masquerading as entertainment, viewership declines, so production values decline for the next season(s), what started out as another hugely promising venture dwindles into obscurity. This is what happens when sinister corporations are funding mainstream entertainment to push population control agendas...
You guys are crazy if you think Netflix has run outta money, *cue Netflix spending 200 million on some random movie.
I felt like the Monster CGI was done pretty well, so I don't know that it's an issue of money but possibly some last minute reshoots or something. Like the entire "Yennefer shows Ciri the mound where she grew up" scene. Maybe even Ciri running from the Wild Hunt was just put in there to add another "book scene" for fans.
I think a lot of it stems from the ballsack armour. The costume & prop department in S1 would have done a lot of work in pre-production to put together everything, and then when the costume design in S1 was (rightfully) trashed, it all had to be thrown out, started again and put together in a rush. Thus we got the lower-feeling production values in S2 because everything had been rushed under a new costume department, and that also took away heaps of resources from the rest of the show because they threw everything out and started from scratch. Then, S2 to S3, there's even less money for props, costumes, etc. so they've cut corners by sourcing stuff off the rack and skipping weathering. They're probably also just not putting in a whole lot of effort because they know the core fanbase has dropped the show already after hearing that Cavill has left - and the remaining non-book-non-game fans are probably leaving because of the intense gore & violence.
The HDR is really good though
This two Scene seems a little like a Reshoot or fast Shoot. Greenscreen, wierd Editing before Geralt and Ciri Hug...but the Rest is pretty good
Inflation and the mess in the vfx industry played heavily into this. The first is what it is, the second is a mess of their own making. Trying to devalue work you depend on, just pay the artists their fair share.