![]() Sign Up: Stay on top of the latest breaking film and TV news! Sign up for our Email Newsletters here.Although it sometimes gets bogged down in its own dense and ill-explained mythology, the second season of the Netflix hit The Witcher proves to be a welcome improvement over the first. We always want the world to feel bigger.” “You could play lots of different scenes in different places in that set and feel like you were in a much more expansive environment than we would physically be able to create on the stage, which is saying a lot, because the stage we had was absolutely enormous. “Columns were designed in a way that if you looked at them from a different angle, it actually became a hallway and you wouldn’t have any idea that it was connected to ,” he said. Kaer Morhen needed to be bigger and gruffer than even Henry Cavill, and so Laws designed environments that could support a surprising number of looks. While “The Witcher” has the freedom to pull from many different real-world influences, its design must ultimately support an ever-evolving understanding of the characters. The scale and versatility Laws achieves, along with the sense of an environment that extends, ultimately does the job other series try so hard to do: create the sense of an immersive world. The “Witcher” world is one where we could plausibly see anything. That these two spaces can co-exist in the same place makes the world of The Continent that much wider, stranger, and more open. “That was all based on a particular castle in Poland, and I think it was a bit of wanting to sort of honor ,” Law said. But they deviated from the standard-issue fantasy castle by both making Kaer Morhen much more run-down than anywhere else on the Continent, while adding distinctive touches in archways, room shape, and stone patterns that set it out as an almost lost style, the same way the last of the Witchers are hanging on by a thread. And so we sort of went to the Southern hemisphere and to India and looked at citadels and things that gave us a language that was different.” Laws and his team kept the basic requirements of a castle - exterior walls, inner keep, a hall for feasting, and hanging the medallions of the fallen on a giant tree that grows out of the stone. “We’d sort of used Northern hemisphere influences for Season 1, we liked the idea of really differentiating and pushing it into an architecture we hadn’t seen. “We’re not bound by a lot of rules,” Laws said in a conversation with IndieWire about the battered Witcher stronghold of Kaer Morhen and other new locations for Season 2. Going for emotional mileage rather than actual mile-markers gave production and creature concept designer Andrew Laws license to stretch the look of Season 2 and build environments that blend a variety of ancient and medieval architecture influences to create something new.įreya Allen and Paul Bullion in “The Witcher” ![]() Instead, the characters live in a world like ours in that it is full of baffling things that make no sense they, like us, are often overwhelmed by its ever-changing alliances, dangers, wonders, and cruelties. “The Witcher” has no interest in presenting its invented geography as a way for us to believe in that world, and deliberately avoids using that kind of a top-level view to get us to care about Ciri ( Freya Allen), Geralt ( Henry Cavill), and Yennifer (Anya Chalotra). In direct contrast to, say, the “Game of Thrones” opening credits’ insistence on getting us to know who lives where, “The Witcher” doesn’t offer viewers any understanding of where Cintra is in relation to Nilfgaard, or how big The North is, or how far it is from Oxenfurt to Sodden. ![]() The Netflix show, set on a place simply called “The Continent,” is one with no map and therefore, really, no end. What else but “The Witcher” would tell you that the location of castle Kaer Morhen is a closely guarded secret that frustrates spies across the realm, and then immediately invites over a tavern full of women, from seemingly next door, for some sexy times, and then interrupt those by turning a man into a tree-beast? But there’s something more fundamental separating “The Witcher” from other fantasy series. Lots of things set “ The Witcher” apart from television shows dabbling in fantasy and magic.
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