Timewaster's Guide Archive
Local Authors => Brandon Sanderson => Topic started by: the Monik Ieron on March 14, 2011, 05:49:24 PM
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i know it would be really hard to pull off twok as a movie since so much of it is in the characters heads and thoughts. not to mention how long it is and how much work it would take to get all the scenery right, plot elements and the right actors for each character, but just imagine how cool Roshar would would on the big sreen AND the action, oh boy i can can just picture the prologue. Sseth son son Valanno truthless of Shinover in his whit assasins clothing lashing everthing doing insane stunts fighting a sharbearer. and dont forget when Kaladin leaps over the chasm and say the oath. the fight with the chasmfiend, and Kaladin taking down the sharbearer in the border skirmish.
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The Way of Kings has been a very vivid book, full of imagery that would look beyond awesome on screen. I mean, take a step back and think about the world - it's a planet where storms are capable of destroying entire civilizations!
Not to mention that the entire magic system is both relatively low on special effects, and saturated with potential.
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I think The Way of Kings would make an awesome movie, except for one thing. It's way too long to fit into a movie properly and the quality would suffer from that much as the Harry Potter stories have, especially the later ones.
What I'm really worried about are the persistent rumors of plans for a Runelords movie. Too many plot points are dependent on people having insane levels of Glamour that can be easily imagined but could never be believably represented in a visual medium.
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(sigh) if only
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I think The Way of Kings would make an awesome movie, except for one thing. It's way too long to fit into a movie properly and the quality would suffer from that much as the Harry Potter stories have, especially the later ones.
??? The early Harry Potter movies were horrible because they followed the books too closely. The screen writing improved dramatically after the second film.
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I think The Way of Kings would make an awesome movie, except for one thing. It's way too long to fit into a movie properly and the quality would suffer from that much as the Harry Potter stories have, especially the later ones.
??? The early Harry Potter movies were horrible because they followed the books too closely. The screen writing improved dramatically after the second film.
I would have to disagree strongly with that. I distinctly remember walking out of the third movie thinking "what in the world was that?!?" And the fourth one was not Harry Potter and the Goblet Of Fire by any means; it was "Harry Potter In The Triwizard Tournament." There was so much more relevant material in the story that they simply didn't have space to put into the movie, and it really suffered for it.
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Anthonypeers, you probably read the books before you watched the movies. Everyone I've talked to who watched the movies and didn't read the books hates or simply got bored during the first two while the third movie (which, IMO, was the best of them all) on were well received by those who never read the books.
Books and movies aren't directly adaptable. They are entirely different mediums and even a 50,000 word novel filmed to be 100% true to the book would be at least two and a half hours long (far longer than the average movie goer wants to sit through). In order to make good movies out of the Harry Potter franchise they had to heavily rewrite the plots to make it conform to the different medium.
In the end you have to chose rather you want to make a movie completely true to the book, or make the best movie you possibly can. Harry Potter and the Sorcerer's Stone was very true to the book and not a very well received movie by those who didn't read the books, while The Jungle Book was absolutely nothing like the novel but was a great success by those who've never read it.
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I feel that the HP movies were in part ruined (not that I don't like them. I just think they could have been much better) because they started the movies before the books were over. The same thing would happen with TWoK. There's too much that may or may not be important, and some of that would get cut out. So sadly, until the series is over it would be silly.
Elantris, on the other hand, would be great now...
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I think The Way of Kings would make an awesome movie, except for one thing. It's way too long to fit into a movie properly and the quality would suffer from that much as the Harry Potter stories have, especially the later ones.
What I'm really worried about are the persistent rumors of plans for a Runelords movie. Too many plot points are dependent on people having insane levels of Glamour that can be easily imagined but could never be believably represented in a visual medium.
Right now you don't have to worry about Runelords. Dave has been asked to do a treatment for the movie. If the studio accepts it then it's all shiny. If not, then you can start worrying.
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I think the best visual medium for epic fantasy is television, when it's done right. Has anyone else been blown away by the trailers for Game of Thrones on HBO? I would love to see that same kind of treatment for, say, the Wheel of Time.
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I think WoK would be more suited for a TV show than a movie. If you look at it when you read it it is in chunks about different characters. I think a TV show would be amazing.
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Yeah, either a 3-4 installment mini series (per book) or a weekly series would be way better. You can cover more in a series than you can in a movie.
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I like the mini-series idea, though I think 4-5. That would give you like 3.5-4 hours of show for a really long book.
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I'm a little bit worried when I hear that, simply because of Legend of the Seeker. The only good thing that can be said about that show was that it was not as bad as the books, if for no other reason than that it stretches the bounds of possibility to take The Sword of Truth and make it any worse! But if someone was to make a TV adaptation of stories that are actually worth reading, such as The Stormlight Archive, I'd hope that it was done by a better team than that.
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I'm a little bit worried when I hear that, simply because of Legend of the Seeker. The only good thing that can be said about that show was that it was not as bad as the books, if for no other reason than that it stretches the bounds of possibility to take The Sword of Truth and make it any worse! But if someone was to make a TV adaptation of stories that are actually worth reading, such as The Stormlight Archive, I'd hope that it was done by a better team than that.
I almost fell out of my chair when I read this. ;D
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Is that a good almost-fall-out-of-chair or a bad one?
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Is that a good almost-fall-out-of-chair or a bad one?
The good kind. I was laughing in agreement.
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This post contains spoilers
As far as a movei goes, Way of Kings is a bit of a mixed bag. One the one hand, a lot of the cool Shardblade fights and stormlight usage by Szeth and Kaladin would work really well. The sceen where Kaladin charges the Parshendi to save Dalinar is very cinimatic and the entire thing would work great as a word for word scene adaptation
On the other hand, Kaladin and Szeth are also very introspective and quite a few scenes are just internal head talking. Kaladin had Syl to bounce off of but this leaves Szeth either very silent or talking to himself a lot, neither of which would work in the movie. Shalan has the same problem with her more internal scenes of moral conflict.
All in all, it would be a mixed bag of good and bad. On an unrelated note, I always pictured the movie as being animated, though that is more of a personal disposition. I've always felt that Fantasy and SF were better suited to animation since their are far fewer limitations. Plus Roshar has a lot more weird locations and fauna that require a lot CG anyway
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Ack! Now you've got me thinking of the retracting fauna from Roshar together with those spiraly retracting jungle plants from Avatar. :P
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This post contains spoilers
As far as a movei goes, Way of Kings is a bit of a mixed bag. One the one hand, a lot of the cool Shardblade fights and stormlight usage by Szeth and Kaladin would work really well. The sceen where Kaladin charges the Parshendi to save Dalinar is very cinimatic and the entire thing would work great as a word for word scene adaptation
On the other hand, Kaladin and Szeth are also very introspective and quite a few scenes are just internal head talking. Kaladin had Syl to bounce off of but this leaves Szeth either very silent or talking to himself a lot, neither of which would work in the movie. Shalan has the same problem with her more internal scenes of moral conflict.
All in all, it would be a mixed bag of good and bad. On an unrelated note, I always pictured the movie as being animated, though that is more of a personal disposition. I've always felt that Fantasy and SF were better suited to animation since their are far fewer limitations. Plus Roshar has a lot more weird locations and fauna that require a lot CG anyway
That's where a good screenwriter comes in. Besides, when you do any sort of filmed production you can't be 100% faithful to the book. There's always something that gets cut or bridged over because it wouldn't transfer well to the screen. That's why the book is almost always better than the movie.
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I think the best visual medium for epic fantasy is television, when it's done right. Has anyone else been blown away by the trailers for Game of Thrones on HBO? I would love to see that same kind of treatment for, say, the Wheel of Time.
Well, epic fantasy is very, for lack of a better term, long. Any other medium that can stretch so long could work. So Tv does, but only if you get enough episodes to do it right. Graphic Novels and Audio can (and do) also work. I would love to see a Stormlight Archive graphic novel with enough room to do it right!
The problem with TV is that if it's to be done right, episodes get expensive, so there is often strong pressure to cut a lot of material. In the case of Game of Thrones, which has turned in my opinion into 90% chaff, that can be a good thing :D
Side note: It called the freaking Song of Ice and Fire! Spoiler Alert, Jon and Daenerys will save the world and most everything else will be mostly irrelevant. Duh! To use the architect versus gardener analogy, Game of Thrones was an incredibly fertile ground, but it's now overgrown with a lot of weeds... /rant
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That's where a good screenwriter comes in. Besides, when you do any sort of filmed production you can't be 100% faithful to the book. There's always something that gets cut or bridged over because it wouldn't transfer well to the screen. That's why the book is almost always better than the movie.
I dunno. I was quite impressed by the movie of The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe for the way they stayed faithful to the book. Of course, it's a much smaller book than the ones we've been talking about, which probably helped quite a bit...
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Personally I think that the miniseries model (like HBO is using, and like a frickin' billion BBC productions) is the best for adapting written works into film/television.
I'm looking forward to seeing how HBO does with its adaptation of A Game of Thrones... if it goes well, it might help to serve as a model for future adaptations of novels. Online distributors like Netflix are now showing an interest in original programming along the lines of the HBO model. And where Netflix goes Hulu (and others) tend to follow, so there's good potential in the market for more of whatever succeeds for HBO.
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I'm looking forward to seeing how HBO does with its adaptation of A Game of Thrones... if it goes well, it might help to serve as a model for future adaptations of novels. Online distributors like Netflix are now showing an interest in original programming along the lines of the HBO model. And where Netflix goes Hulu (and others) tend to follow, so there's good potential in the market for more of whatever succeeds for HBO.
That's exactly how I was thinking. Generally a good [successful] idea is followed almost to the T by all other competitors. Just look at technology. Microsoft vs Apple is just one company ripping off the other for ideas over n over.
I'd love to see original content from streaming companies, they already have a viewer base because of all the consoles out there in the world. Can't WAIT to be rid of DVD media [currently in the middle of converting all my dvds into a home media server so I won't have to touch the damn things].
A TV or mini-series would be the most successful for such a long epic hopefully a long running one too that doesn't get cancelled quickly [Screw you people behind Stargate: Universe! GARR!]
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I agree with Inkthinker that the internet and new technologies will bring good things for fantasy fans. Think about it - the more media technology advanced in the past, the easier it has become to produce niche content (and let's face it, that's what we are). With more distribution ways, cheaper distribution over the net, and a huge new audience in international markets that are suddenly accessible, it will be even easier to make good products for a smaller audience. Which means more good TV for fantasy fans! :)
We even had a sci-fi channel for a while, before it started to just crossbreed animals for disaster movies... :P
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That's where a good screenwriter comes in. Besides, when you do any sort of filmed production you can't be 100% faithful to the book. There's always something that gets cut or bridged over because it wouldn't transfer well to the screen. That's why the book is almost always better than the movie.
I agree that movies can not be 100% faithful and can in fact be better if done correctly. However, with Way of Kings, I think that the major character arcs for both Kaladin and Shalan are to introspective to adapt well to the big screen. It can certainly be done, but unless the screenwriter is REALLY good it would likely not work out compleatly
As an example, Kaladin goes through quite the emotional roller coaster during the book, with a lot of internal questioning of who he is, what he can and can't change, and if the path he is trying to follow even exists. This can be shown via external narrative but works much better internally
Still, all of my points don't change the fact that if a movie were made I would likely be in the seats on opening night, probably wearing 3-D glasses
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I agree with CrazyN8R that WoK is rally too introspective to be converted accurately to a film or TV show. Especially a film.
Now, a series of graphic novels, now we're talking.
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Graphic novel WOK?
Oh my......It would take an entire wall of shelves......can you imagine how many volumes it would take just for the first book? Holy crap!
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Graphic novel WOK?
Oh my......It would take an entire wall of shelves......can you imagine how many volumes it would take just for the first book? Holy crap!
Pardon me while I clean up my drool...
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Graphic novel WOK?
Oh my......It would take an entire wall of shelves......can you imagine how many volumes it would take just for the first book? Holy crap!
Action scenes tend to draw out into more pages, dialogue scenes can go by more quickly. Descriptive scenes can be handled in just a few images, or maybe even one. It also depends on how condensed the storytelling is when adapted to sequential art form... some creators tell a lot of story with every page, and some draw it out.
Though considering the first book is 1000 pages, and there's planned to be ten more... well, it'd be a lot. Keep a man busy for a few years, anyway.
:)
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Another problem is trying to fit in 10 books with the same actors, who are obviously not going to be the same after the time it takes to make 10 movies.
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I hadn't thought of that. I guess if you wait until the series is almost done and film each book back to back then it could be done. Otherwise half the cast would be dead before you got halfway through.
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I think it'd work well as an animated series, though knowing how that business works I doubt very much that it would make it all the way to the end of the books.
Plus it would almost certainly have some "anime" trappings, given the nature of the content and the necessities of market and production. That would probably spark a fan-schism that would fester until culminating in a riot at the very first CosmereCon, where surely, surely someone would end up with an indian rope burn.
And those things frickin' sting.
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I think it'd work well as an animated series, though knowing how that business works I doubt very much that it would make it all the way to the end of the books.
Oooh..... :o
Now I'm envisioning a Studio Ghibli anime of it and I'm liking it....especially if the art was along the lines of Princess Mononoke. That would be freaking amazing!
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I hadn't thought of that. I guess if you wait until the series is almost done and film each book back to back then it could be done. Otherwise half the cast would be dead before you got halfway through.
Working at the kind of pace they'd need to work at to finish all 10 movies in a row, the cast would be dead before they got halfway through anyway.