Game of Thrones: Winter is Coming and HBO has the Colour Palette to Prove It

It’s all about colour, or the colour palette, to be precise. Colours create moods and define locations and are actually characters themselves. For instance, there’s the southern Westerosi coastal city of King’s Landing, bathed in sunshine and presented in warm tones of yellows and reds. In contrast, there’s the northern stronghold of Winterfell, in a frigid and dark land rendered in deep blues and blacks, almost devoid of colour.

Then there’s the overall colour palette for the series as a whole. In a land where seasons can last decades or even generations, devotees of the novels and the series know “winter is coming.” This seasonal change has progressed over the first seven seasons, and the palette of the show has steadily progressed to a colder, darker, more ominous look and feel. Game of Throne’s colour palette has shifted from summer to winter, and the onset of winter has desaturated the colours of the series. Season 1 Episode 1, “Winter is Coming,” used the lightest colour palette, and the penultimate season, Season 7, was the “coldest” so far.

The darkest episodes were the ones that centred around grand night battles. In Season 2, Episode 9, “Blackwater,” the only real splash of colour was the neon green of the “wildfire” used to incinerate an attacking armada. The entire episode is dedicated to the climactic Battle of the Blackwater, in which the Lannister army, commanded by acting Hand of the King Tyrion Lannister, defends the city of King's Landing as King Stannis Baratheon's fleet stages an attack at Blackwater Bay. 

As we’ve seen, colour helps tell the Game of Thrones story. But how does BenQ reproduce them as the showrunners and production designers and directors and cinematographers and editors intended?

To answer that question it is first important to know what colour is and how it’s reproduced in a digital image. One of the ways to convey colour digitally is by breaking it into its three properties: hue, saturation and lightness, known as HSL colour space. 

The names we give colors really refer to their hue. Red, orange, yellow, green, blue, indigo and violet make up the rainbow and are hues. Hue is measured in degrees, starting with red at 0 degrees, transitioning to cyan at 180 degrees, and then coming back full circle to red at 360 degrees. Colours in the top half of the circle are considered warm colours, and those in the bottom half are cool colours.

Next comes saturation. That is a measure of the purity of the colour, by measuring how much grey is mixed in. Saturation of 0 percent is entirely grey, while 100 percent is the purest version of the colour.

Lightness is the amount of white in the color. When lightness is at 0 percent the colour is black, and when lightness is at 100 percent the colour is white.

Our eyes are not very good at seeing hue, saturation and lightness as three separate elements. For example, it’s easier to choose which shade of red is the lightest than to pick the lightest of two different colours.

Of all DLP projector components, the colour wheel has the greatest effect on colour. Achieving a perfect balance between colour accuracy and brightness requires high precision and stringent quality control. Because even nanometer differences create great differences to colour spectrum, BenQ CinematicColor™ uses precise nanometer-level references to test over 20 combinations of colour wheel angle and coating. Each colour wheel is carefully fabricated with high-pure-colour coatings to meet Rec. 709 colour gamut requirements and reproduce the true colour of Hollywood films.