Has Game of Thrones gotten darker over the course of its seven seasons? Vox decided to find out by investigating how the show’s color palette has changed over time.
And we don’t mean that they watched each episode and were like “this one is mostly blue” and “that one is kinda orange.” They broke down every episode of the show like scientists on a mission. Watch the results of research in the video below, and we’ll discuss the highlights.
That’s some detailed analysis!
Overall, Vox noticed that, over the course of 67 episodes, the shows colors have gotten colder and darker. That makes sense, as winter has slowly been coming all this time, so the cinematography is matching what’s happening in the environment of the world where these characters live.
How did Vox come to these conclusions? They took a screen capture every ten seconds, created a spectrum chart, and averaged the screenshots together to come up with a color hue for each episode. Totaled up, more episodes were dominated by warm colors than cold ones.
The warmth of the early and middle seasons, with lots of time spent in the sunnier reaches of Essos and King’s Landing, keeps the overall color scale weighted in the favor of the oranges. (Bursts of dragonbreath must help, too.) But that lead may not hold. The blues were creeping onscreen more and more during season 7, and that with the White Walkers on the way, that will most certainly continue through season 8.
Let’s take a look at some of Vox’s more detailed findings, which you can check out here.
The premiere episode, “Winter is Coming,” is the brightest episode of the entire series. That’s to be expected — at that point, winter had never been further away. Also, the Viserys/Daenerys storyline, set in sunny Pentos, was all kinds of bright.
But it may be more mundane that that. Nearly all series need some time to establish their tone, style and look, and it could be that “Winter is Coming” just employs a more standard lighting package.
The darkest episode is season 2’s “Blackwater,” closely followed by season 4’s “The Watchers on the Wall.” Both episodes involve battles at night. In “Blackwater,” the blazes of green wildfire that destroy Stannis’ ships are the only sources of bright color.
We expect things to just get colder and darker in season 8. Winter’s here, and it wants you to know.
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