That Awkward Moment When Rings of Power Ran Out of Extras
Things like that happen even if you have astronomical Amazon budgets, huh?
The Rings of Power could not complain about not having enough money to do anything the creators wanted. Due to Amazon cashing out, the showrunners were able to bring the stunning visuals to the screen, basically making almost every viewer (including many critics) to just insert themselves into this reality.
However, even this magical world with carefully worked out costumes, shining elven trees and beautiful fantasy cities does have its own problems with... people. Because yes, looks like when it comes to a good old large crowd of regular folks, Amazon suddenly ran out of extras — so the VFX artists had to literally copy and paste some of the folks in the crowd.
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Some people suggested that such a move was used due to coronavirus restrictions during filming that prevented Amazon from actually hiring a crowd of people and made the studio resort to just copy-pasting some of the extras to create the illusion of a large group of folks.
Others have a different view, joking that a very large chunk of the budget went to that now-iconic slomo sequence of Galadriel riding a horse (and being weirdly happy about it).
On a serious note, many people highlighted that The Rings of Power is definitely not the first media to use the copy-paste method to make several extras look like a crowd of people. Even in the Lord of the Rings movies, fans claimed, one could spot identical people in different corners of the screen when a sense of crowd was needed.
Still, the final result does look a bit awkward when you have already spotted the similar people in different places. On the other hand, do such trifles even matter if a show is good? With The Rings of Power, the question is tricky, because the Lord of the Rings spinoff has weathered quite a lot of criticism before and after its release, with some people still lambasting it for "lazy writing", "being woke", or even "ruining Tolkien legacy".
Despite that, a lot of people actually enjoyed the show and now wait for the new chapter of the story. The filming of The Rings of Power season 2 is already underway, but the premiere date will be announced later.