I finally sat down and watched the first episode of Seven Swordsmen, it was a little slow at times but they do have to introduce characters and establish the plot so that's fine.
Based on the series trailer and the first episode I think there's going to be some rather impressive action / stunt work, much better than I would have expected in a TV series.
Visually though this is an odd series, it's a matted 4:3 picture that took a little while to get used to, I haven't seen that done for a while and to be honest it didn't look that great on my wide screen TV ( I might even watch the rest of the series on my old 4:3 TV in the bedroom ), I don't know what they shot it on but it wasn't film but then it doesn't really seem like video either so I guess it's some sort of digital format.
Most of the first episode was shot hand held with the occasional very nice crane shot, unless it's a night shot the producers don't seem too worried about lighting so I guess this was made pretty quickly, the camera operator tends to push right up into the actors faces, or shoot from close to the ground so that the viewer is looking up at the action on screen which takes a bit of getting used to since that's not typical for any TV series I've ever seen.
I terms of production value, the costumes props and sets seem to be of a very high quality although I guess they could be re-using items that were originally made for a movie project, there have been several scenes where there has been squads of men in full armour riding on horse back which I wasn't expecting to see in a TV production.
I'm hoping to watch a couple more episodes over the weekend, this is the first serious live action Chinese TV series I've seen so I think it'll be interesting to compare it to western television productions.
