Someone Increased The Brightness Of The Latest GoT Episode And Unveiled Many Unseen Details

Everyone who watched the latest episode of Game of Thrones can tell you that it was way too dark – you could barely see a thing until Melisandre lit things up! In fact, some fans of the show decided to take matters into their own hands and turned the brightness of the episode up, revealing many details about the Battle of Winterfell you might have missed.

h/t

Image credits: HBO

There might be a reason why the episode was so dark: it could have been done to represent the horror of war more realistically. It’s a challenge for most of us to not hit the coffee table when stumbling to the toilet in the middle of the night, so imagine what it would be like to spot an enemy 100 yards away in pitch darkness. According to Elite Daily, the whole experience might have been a whole lot different if the episode was watched in IMAX on a large screen since more light is projected on a bigger screen.

Grey Worm

Image credits: Hivemind

A YouTube account called Hivemind turned the brightness up in the scene where the Wights are making their way across the battlefield to attack the Unsullied and played it alongside the original, shedding a little more light on the scene.

Arya

Image credits: Hivemind

“[GoT] has always been very dark and a very cinematic show,” said Fabian Wagner, the cinematographer of the episode in an interview with TMZ. “We tried to give the viewers and fans a cool episode to watch. I know it wasn’t too dark because I shot it.”

Daenerys And Jon Snow

Image credits: Hivemind

“The showrunners decided that this had to be a dark episode. We’d seen so many battle scenes over the years – to make it truly impactful and to care for the characters, you have to find a unique way of portraying the story…” said Wagner in an interview with WIRED. “Another look would have been wrong. Everything we wanted people to see is there … Personally, I don’t have to always see what’s going on because it’s more about the emotional impact.”

Tormund

Image credits: Hivemind

“Game of Thrones is a cinematic show and therefore you have to watch it like you’re at a cinema: in a darkened room,” added the cinematographer. “If you watch a night scene in a brightly-lit room then that won’t help you see the image properly.”

Jon Snow

Image credits: Hivemind

“A lot of the problem is that a lot of people don’t know how to tune their TVs properly … A lot of people also, unfortunately, watch it on small iPads, which in no way can do justice to a show like that anyway,” continued Wagner.

Dragons lighting up the enemies

Image credits: Hivemind

Brienne of Tarth rallying the troops

Image credits: Hivemind

Daenerys riding her dragon

Image credits: Hivemind

Jaime Lannister

Image credits: Hivemind

Grey Worm

Image credits: Hivemind

Sansa and Arya

Image credits: Hivemind

Jon Snow

Image credits: Hivemind

The chaotic battlefield

Image credits: Hivemind

Gendry

Image credits: Hivemind

The Hound

Image credits: Hivemind

See the brightened episode in the video below

Image credits: Hivemind

Others also tried brightening up the episode – like Reddit user czmanix. In an interview with Bored Panda, he said that even though he understands the creators’ decision to make the episode dark from an artistic standpoint, he thinks they did not take into account technical limitations. “Most of the action happens between 5 to 20 % of brightness. A lot of TVs have problems with these dark colors and often crush them,” said the user.

Other brightened up moments from the episode

Image credits: czmanix

“Also, HBO was serving more compressed version to the first wave of viewers to survive the onslaught and often aggressive compression ignores parts, that “an eye cannot see”, but that’s where the most of action was happening,” added czmanix. “So the creators were able to see it on their TVs, but bad TVs in bright rooms and an aggressive compression created this mess.”

Image credits: czmanix

He edited the episode to see more of what was happening, especially the dragons scene.

Image credits: czmanix

“[I edited the footage] using Lumetri Color in Adobe Premiere Pro. Usually, it’s used for color grading, but I used it to restore most of the original color palette,” said the redditor.