In his latest Guardians of the Galaxy “pic of the day” entry, director James Gunn showed off the image above — a scale model of the Morag temple set from the beginning of the movie.
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A key set piece and the spot where much of the film’s trailer actually took place, Morag looked pretty incredible onscreen — but apparently its size was actually more restrictive than you would think, so they built a model to try and work around angles and other tricks of photography and blocking to make the area appear larger.
You can check out Gunn’s notes on the image below. Guardians of the Galaxy is in theaters now.
#gotgpicoftheday Scale model of the Morag temple set while standing on the Morag landscape set. While, yes, #GuardiansoftheGalaxy had a sizable budget, it wasn’t unlimited, and even seemed restrictive at times considered the scope of the film we were making. So we weren’t able to build an endless amount of sets. One of the biggest sets was the Morag landscape – but, still, considering it was supposed to be an entire planet it seemed small. Therefore the AD Jamie Christopher, the production designer Charlie Wood, the cinematographer Ben Davis, and I came up with a very complicated way of shooting one set from many different angles and moving rock structures around to make it seem much larger than it was. Then, again because we had limited space and budget, we turned the Morag landscape set into the interior Morag temple set. In this photo here Charlie Wood brought a model of the Morag temple onto the Morag landscape set so we could discuss where everything goes and how we could make Quill’s relatively short journey dancing through the temple seem like a relatively long one by shooting the temple from a variety of angles. Whew. Just writing all this stuff down makes me remember what a headache it was working it all out. #gotg
