Some people are dedicated to their craft on a level I can’t even comprehend, and I’ll never stop having respect for those crazy so and so’s. The people who recreate major cities, both real and fictional, in Minecraft, for example. But once in a while you see something takes your breath away even here on the internet, where those kinds of obsessives are superstars. Take, for example, the Italian animation team that recreated King’s Landing, the capitol city of Westeros from Game of Thrones, entirely out of paper. Yes, paper. The project was actually undertaken to promote Moleskine’s new line of Game of Thrones themed notebooks, and while Dadomani could easily have completed the project with CGI, the determined buggers decided to painstakingly recreate King’s Landing, as seen in the show’s opening credits, using papercraft models.
Before you ask, the real thing doesn’t actually fold away and vanish like it does in the video. No one’s that nuts. But the intricacy of the model is insane given the material used. I can’t even imagine the stress generated by such a project. Imagine the paranoia that would set in, knowing something this time consuming and ornate, that must have taken days upon days to build, could be completely obliterated in a heartbeat if one of the modelers lost their balance and fell forward into it, or if the lamps shorted out and lit the thing on fire. That’s nervous breakdown material if I ever saw it. And what’s more, try and wrap your head around the fact that the 40 second promo required 7600 pieces and 750 photos.
You can check out the promo, and perhaps more interestingly a brief behind the scenes video, below.