Waiting for Game of Thrones to return is nearly as agonizing as a Westeros winter — complete with White Walkers — especially after the tumultuous season 6 finale. Unfortunately, the ongoing wait is going to the longest one yet, and there are fewer episodes waiting on the other side. HBO has announced that the season 7 will premiere in summer 2017 and consist of just seven episodes.
With winter finally having arrived on the show, showrunners David Benioff and D.B. Weiss wanted to move production back to shoot with “some grim, gray weather,” they revealed during a recent UFC podcast. Logistically speaking, it makes sense, even if the unfortunate consequence is that the decision “pushed everything down the line.” Production won’t begin until later this summer, according to HBO President Casey Bloys. It will be based in Northern Ireland, while parts of the series will also be filmed in Spain and Iceland.
Although we’d held out hope that a shorter season 7 would keep the series on track for its usual springtime premiere, that is unfortunately not the case. The threat of a delay is now a reality, in spite of the fact that season 7 will be three episodes shorter than the show’s usual 10-episode installments. At least we can take comfort in the fact that it won’t be the last.
Season 7 will pick up with the fight for control over the kingdoms of Westeros and the Iron Throne. Last season ended with — spoiler alert! — Cersei Lannister (played by Lena Headey) taking over the coveted position of power, but she’ll continue to be challenged by her rivals, including Jon Snow (Kit Harington) and Daenerys Targaryen (Emilia Clarke), who, at some point, have to discover that they’re related.
The wait won’t be easy, but the payoff will be worth it.
Updated 7/18/16 by Stephanie Topacio Long: This post has been updated to incorporate the show’s summer start date and official episode count.
China just gave Hollywood a cautionary tale about AI filmmaking. Sanxingdui: Future Past, billed as the country's first fully AI-generated movie, hit theaters on October 23 and bombed at the box office.
According to Futurism, the film's reported $1.5 million production budget landed on more than 10,000 screens. Yet it pulled in only about $181,000, averaging roughly $20 per screen, making the budget difficult to recover.
Some of the best shots in Grok Imagine’s AI-made Odyssey don’t contain actors. Ancient landscapes stretch into the distance. Close-ups of grimy hands suggest people who have touched something rougher than a keyboard. For a few seconds, the illusion holds.
https://twitter.com/imagine/status/2113712964419063911
YouTube videos could soon look better without eating quite so much data, right? Thankfully, the platform plans to introduce a new video format called AV2 on its web player in early 2027, promising more efficient streaming and potentially fewer playback hiccups on slower internet connections. The big headline is a roughly 30% improvement in compression efficiency over AV1, YouTube's existing video format. That doesn't guarantee every video will use 30% less data, but it could make streaming a little easier on both internet connections and data allowances.
What is AV2, and why should viewers care?