Good Mythical Morning Intro
Direction & Production Design
Rhett & Link 2014
What does the Cockatrice say!?
(crook-crook cra cra cra cra-cra!...)
The Devil is in the Details...
Good Mythical Morning is...well, mythical. That leaves a lot of room to explore. What makes something mythical anyway? Come on! Let's look!...
The rock column was the foreground element in Good Mythical Morning's new intro, so it needed a lot of detail. Not just in color but in texture. The shot concept is a sunrise over a mythical sea. The combination of sharply angled light and a column slick with imaginary morning condensation meant lots of nice shadows and highlights, but only if there's loads of texture.
I was pretty inspired by some incredible rock formations that aren't mythical at all, but amazing places that I hope to visit some day. In particular, Zhangjiajie National Forest in China. The rock formations there defy gravity. They stand like slivers skyward, natural skyscrapers in a jungle of lush green.
The other big influence was Close Encounters of the Third Kind, one of my all time favorite movies. *Spoiler Alert* Devil's Tower feels pretty damn mythical to me. I went down an internet rabbit hole and learned that no one knows exactly how Devil's Tower formed, but something called intrusion is agreed to be the process.
Knowledge is power, y'all!
I'm DIY to the bone, so I used a bunch of awesome cardboard tubes I already had. They're the kind that fabric is rolled onto. They're strong and easy to work with. I started cutting angled slivers out of the rolls and gluing them into a twisty, intrusion-inspired column. I covered the whole thing with buckram as a solid base layer so I could coat it in plaster. Buckram is awesome and fun to say over and over.
Buckram. Buckram. Buckram.
You doin' it?
I mixed some paint into the plaster and put some Wu-Tang Clan on. 36 Chambers later I had the makings of a rock column.
After a series of plaster coats, painting and carving it was starting to look like something. Admittedly, I'm always learning, so a few times I plastered over what I carved, carved out what I painted, and generally undid and redid some of the work.
Whomp Whomp.
The last step was dressing the beastie. I wanted it to have more moss and growth around the bottom, and thin out as we neared the top. Lots of vines and shrubs with just a few tenacious trees staking a claim higher up the shaft.
By contrast, the background landscape called for much less detail. Cardboard, Plaster, and paint got the sprinkle treatment from my un-patented formula of herbs and model tree foliage. I used super fine sawdust I'd been saving for a rainy day (there's a clever pun in there somewhere) to use as the sandy coastlines and crumpled blackwrap for the distant mountains.
