Setting the scene
2016’s five hottest introductory sequences welcome viewers to the show.
Even if you’re a binge-viewer, there’s something special about watching your favourite show’s intro video. It brings together the themes and emotions that dominate storylines and a great title sequence will take you out of your world and fixes your mind on the story – all in one short, glorious package. Creating the introduction is such an intense job that there are companies that specialise in it. “It’s its own art form,” says Garson Yu, whose company YU+co made the haunting titles for fantasy how The Leftovers (2014- current). In 2016, we loved these new series introductions…
Season, 1 M-Net Edge (*102) – Sci-fi Ambiguity about the borders of life and creation saturates Westworld. The introduction plays with our senses from the first frame, when we aren’t sure if we’re looking at a skeleton or a desert. Stretching piano wire moves onto 3Dprinted tendons, both created mechanically, while the beautifully lit blackand-white sequence and sweeping orchestral music refer to classical art. Knowing that Westworld is about a themepark that uses robots to profit from human appetites for sex and death (played up in the half-formed, skinless robots in the intro) gives the contrasting delicate mechanical creativity of the intro more impact. “The more you watch, the more you’ll see how these images reflect the story. Nothing is in there by accident,” says Patrick Clair, creative director from Elastic, who made the iconic Game Of Thrones (2011- current) intro in 2011.
Season 1, AMC (*140) – Drama Weaponry, high society and visual trickery that echoes the show’s spy games fill this sequence as a coffee pot and six cups transform into the chambers of a revolving cannon and tracer-flare trails change into strands from a pearl necklace. “The design process was a case of taking weapons from the nightly news and putting them in a situation where we treat them like a perfume bottle in a magazine ad,” reveals Patrick.