User blog comment:XD1/Season 3 Premiere Reactions/@comment-5014364-20130402004835

I will say, with regard to human-like Giants, that my theory is this:  think of the amount of money it would have cost in terms of CGI and prosthetics to make the yeti-like Giants from the books; covered in fur, and having *blatantly* non-human proportions, so that they would be impossible for a man in a suit to play; we're talking full motion-capture here. That's *VERY* expensive.

If it was a choice between the Giants and more scenes with CGI  Dragons, I fully agree that they should spend it on the dragons.

I mean think about it:  the human-like Giants were okay in terms of basic effect; just the sound effects editing made it "feel" like there was a 14 foot tall giant thumping around. But what was that effect, really? It was just Whyte in a Giant costume - just a wildling costume with some minor facial prosthetics to change his facial proportions up a bit. It's actually the same effect they used to make the direwolves larger in season 2 - a simple "up-scaling" of real-life footage. Book-accurate Giants would have required expensive CGI and motion-capture.

More importantly, during the off-season there were those speculating that because book-accurate Giants would logically require expensive CGI and motion capture (already being used up on the Dragons), that ***we might not even have Giants in the TV series at all***

So, given the budgetary limitations, I would indeed rather have human-like Giants instead of no Giants at all. I hate reducing it to "anything is better than nothing", but from a simple pragmatic standpoint, truly beyond the control of the TV producers, there simply weren't enough funds to make Dragons, Direwolves, AND book-accurate Giants. They can't even do all of the Dragon scenes they want (they have to plan them out sparingly).

The TV Giants are okay, and I was ultimately excited when he appeared on screen. Again, in terms of simple editing and cinematography, it just FELT "big". Better to have a human-like Giant that seems realistic, vs a cheap bad CGI book-accurate one who is so badly animated that it makes us painfully aware it isn't real.