The Ancient One

“We don’t even care… whether or not we care….”

– Morla the Ancient One, The Neverending Story

This week, we present designer Erin Gallagher in her costume interpretation of Morla the Ancient One, the giant turtle oracle from The Neverending Story, with makeup by Michelle Rose Nobs.

A Beloved Novel

Around my tenth birthday, I received the novel The Neverending Story, by Michael Ende, as a gift. The film had come out the previous year, and we had gone to see it at the local theater in the Quad Cities. I remember setting up camp in the lower bunk of the bed, reading The Neverending Story until late at night, just like Bastian Balthazar Bux did in the film. Strange how vivid those memories come back thirty-six years later: the Desert of Colors, the Swamps of Sadness, the Ivory Tower.… The black-and-white chapter illustrations pushed me to reinterpret my perception of the film, as the book was darker in tone, more frightening. I remember reaching the middle of the book and finding that I’d reached the end of the events in the movie—and that’s when an even darker narrative set in, with our protagonist becoming selfish, arrogant, and greedy.… It was a special book, just as the old bookseller describes it in the film, and though I haven’t read it since then, it has stuck with me. So when Erin Gallagher said she wanted to portray a costumed interpretation of Morla using lorgnettes (old-fashioned spectacles with a handle) to magnify the Ancient One’s enormous eyes, I was excited to join her on the journey.

Photographer shooting in costume for once

Here’s what Erin had to say about the costume design:

I did plan the costume around the lorgnettes… and cleaning up rando stuff in my shop. I had so much that I gave myself the designer challenge not to consume. Or even take anything apart. I wanted it to be raw and gross while through a period lens. I didn’t necessarily seek authenticity. More like, if Morla the Ancient One was old eighteenth-century aristocracy, what would she look like, and how would the canon translate thereto?
Erin Gallagher, designer

Production in the Pandemic

We ceased all photography sessions with the coming of the pandemic. Over the past year, we shot three sessions for trusted friends who were either doctors, contract tracers, or had strictly adhered to a lockdown lifestyle. We had a trained contact tracer onsite and observed masking and social distancing protocols in order to minimize risk. The most effective way to minimize risk is not to shoot at all, of course, which is what we observed for the other three hundred and sixty-two days of the last year.

Makeup artist Michelle Rose Nobs working her magic

The Many Colored Death

Since the costume primarily showed tones of goldenrod, straw, and brass, we shot the image on a blue canvas background we painted in late summer 2020. The blue canvas provides a unique texture to the background, emphasized by brushes, rollers, and paint spatter.

Initially, this blue seemed a good choice to represent the Swamps of Sadness, which tend toward grays and blues in the film. Those colors would complement the warmer yellow tones in the image. I took a screen capture from the film and ran it through Adobe Color to verify. Sure enough, the cinematic swamps are on the cool side of the spectrum, predominantly grays that graduate into neutral browns and black.

When we began editing the images, the blues and the yellow did indeed contrast, but the result didn’t really suggest Morla so much as Madame Thénardier at the end of Les Misérables. There is little (or perhaps no) yellow in the cinematic Morla, but since the yellow dress is the object of the photograph, we don’t want to change its color too much; the solution was to change the background.

Swamps of Sadness color theme taken from *The Neverending Story* screen capture

Shifting the blues toward green moved them adjacent to the dress’s yellow on the color wheel, and our color scheme changed from a contrasting complementary look to a more harmonious analogous one. Even though the resulting colors departed farther from the cinematic Morla the Ancient One, the details of the image became clearer and easier to see; the green and yellow suggested turtle shell and slimy swamp far better than the blue and yellow had done.

Once we had figured out that we needed to distance ourselves from the film to get closer to the concept we wanted, we were ready to process the images and take them in our ultimate direction: Morla the Ancient One flaunting her high (recycled) fashion—confident, reserved, doesn’t even care whether or not she cares. The Ancient One is her own creature.

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Here are a few other images from the session.