This is How VFX Artists Introduced The White Lotus Opening Credit to Life

Season 2 of The White Lotus has given viewers male nudity, threesomes and awful rich people aplenty—however for a lot of followers, the satirical drama’s most generally appreciated second is its title sequence, with its catchy-as-hell theme tune and wealthy visuals.

In anticipation of tonight’s season finale, filmmakers Mark Bashore and Katrina Crawford from the studio Plains of Yonder spoke with Vanity Fair concerning the creative influences that went into the present’s unskippable opening credit, and the various allusions to the plot and characters which can be hiding in these frescos.

“It is eye-catching, however it additionally must be form of cheeky and erotic and profound,” says Crawford. “The floor isn’t all the time what represents what’s beneath.”

Classical artwork and Greco-Roman mythology performed an enormous function within the conception of the credit, and Crawford and Bashore reveal that the trompe l’oeil on the Villa Tasca in Palermo, Siciliy had been a serious inspiration.

“At instances, the imagery had quite a lot of metaphor in it, but additionally didn’t have sufficient to make a real arc and take issues the place we needed to take them, by way of mischief and belongings you’ve by no means seen earlier than, particularly on historical work,” says Bashore. “In order that’s the place the technical problem actually got here in: How will we paint new work, or paint in with these and make them look legit and really feel like they one way or the other belong?”

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The staff had quite a lot of enjoyable discovering creative references which they might pair up with every character to seem alongside the solid names within the titles, such because the couple on a donkey which present up alongside Jon Gries to symbolize Tanya and Greg’s Vespa journey, and the canine cocking its leg in opposition to the nude statue for Theo James. “It’s humorous, however what males do finest is raise their legs on issues,” says Bashore. “Typically the only issues, like a canine lifting his leg on the backside of a statue, can do a world for a shot.”