Canyon Princess

Premise

“Up on the canyon edge, there’s a ship that sails the sky. They say it carries a thousand ghosts who once ate black gold and lived as gods. Big waters brought it here before my grandmother was born. We climbed up there once when we were kids, but there’s great flakes of sharp iron everywhere like as not to slice you wide. It’s bad vibes close up, but pretty from down on the river here, far away and safe. She’s the Princess of the Canyon. Like the bones of big birds you see frozen in the rock, a remembrance of long, long ago.”

Canyon Princess and Uturnpike are scenes from the opening montage for Daughter of God. Just two elements, a massive derelict cruise ship and the lovely canyons of the San Juan river demonstrate the efficacy of the KISS aesthetic, (Keep it Simple and Subtle). Just a couple of changes got her ready for the reel.

Weston and Gibbs observed that the ship looked ancient yet the sky was crisscrossed with jet contrails, clear evidence of a extant technological civilization. I replaced the sky by doing a roto of the canyon rim.

Before removal of jet contrails, the sky bespoke human presence

After color correction, a certain yellow rock looked human made and quite distracting, so I had to power mask that away.

The distracting yellow rock prior to power mask.

There’s actually some wobble with the motion tracking on the ship, but that’s a revision for the future. Currently the ship has a simple procedural texture, but I’d like to give the boat a hand painted texture, as illustrated in the brick impetus of 2008. My brother Steve keeps insisting that a big boat couldn’t balance on rocks like that, it would break in half. If the Twin Towers can free fall without demolition charges, then the ass of a freakin’ cruise ship can hang in empty space. Hollywood physics has colonized reality!

“Do what thou wilt shall be the whole of the law”. That’s a quote from one of those Crowleys, Dave or Aleister, I forget.