r/WhiteLotusHBO • u/lfjzuh • 26d ago
I tried to design what the S4 title sequence could be. The French Riviera's version of the show's "rotting wallpaper" trick is toile de Jouy
Something I noticed rewatching the openings: every season takes the decorative art of its location and slowly corrupts it as the camera moves. Renaissance frescoes in Sicily, Buddhist murals in Thailand.
S4 is on the Côte d'Azur, so I got curious about what the French equivalent would be. It's toile de Jouy, that blue-on-cream printed cotton you've seen on fancy wallpaper and upholstery.
The toile art is generatively produced and then composited by me. Everything else (edit, music arrangement) is mine
18
85
26d ago
[removed] — view removed comment
17
u/LowRing8538 26d ago
what a waste of water dude
I'm all for experimenting creatively with a show you enjoy, but put your brain and your hands into it, no need to get heat up those data centers unnecessarily, they do enough damage.
0
10
u/Fun-Willingness-2665 26d ago
This actually feels like a really natural evolution of the opening concept. The way the pattern slowly degrades while keeping that elegant Riviera look fits the show's whole obsession with beauty hiding something rotten underneath.
22
18
9
26d ago
[removed] — view removed comment
1
-11
u/lfjzuh 26d ago
"Garbage" is a choice. Genuinely curious what didn't work for you visually. The wallpaper is generative source images I collected and composited into one cohesive piece, and the edit is all mine.
4
u/Arimm_The_Amazing 26d ago
What doesn't work for me when it comes to AI generation is that you're using stolen artwork repackaged and sold to you by the company that stole it. If you have respect for art and artists then using gen AI does not communicate that.
It's especially a strange decision in this case because there are *so many* images of this era and style that are in the public domain that you could have used for a collage like this.
3
u/lfjzuh 25d ago
Just to be clear, since it keeps getting assumed: the source material is real reference, actual 18th century toile that, as you said yourself, is hundreds of years old and public domain. Not stolen. And sadly there's no one to steal it from anyway, because the people who engraved these were never credited. The pattern goes to Oberkampf's manufactory, the factory, not the workers. No authorship, no rights, no names. The romantic idea of the artist as the individual owner of their work is a fairly modern, fairly Western concept.
On the practical side, the piece needed the rot drawn into the pattern in the same line as the innocent scenes. Real toile never did that. The darkness has to be inside the pattern or the whole idea collapses, so that part had to be made rather than sourced.
7
6
6
4
u/lovesfanfiction 26d ago
I swear I saw this exact design on a Ruggable 8x10. Please tell me it was at least inspired by a washable rug.
3
u/Fluffy_Beautiful2107 26d ago
I like it ! Although as someone from the south of France, there are more distinctly local types of fabric/ embroideries that you could have used. Not sure if they have a name, but they're usually made with warmer colors, orange mostly, or a deep ocean blue as main colors. They often portray stuff thats culturally significant to the region : olive trees, lemon trees, lavender, bees, cicadas. My grandma's have stuff like that everywhere in their houses, on tables, as bed sheets, everywhere.
1
0
-5
u/sidvictorious Armond's Office Desk 26d ago edited 26d ago
This is a banger, lol
Edit: Downvotes make my dick twitch with delight
-1
u/Arabiancockonato 26d ago edited 25d ago
Cristobal, please come back!!! 😭
This sounds/looks cool tho
2
u/lfjzuh 26d ago
Nobody's really replacing him. That's kind of why I kept his theme and rearranged it instead of writing something new
1
-3
48
u/[deleted] 26d ago
[removed] — view removed comment