“As time evolved so did the means of artistically replicating reality, from cave drawings…to engraving, to painting, to photography, and to its (thus far) most convincing form, cinema. In the task of duplicating reality cinema has surpassed all other forms of representation.” – From “André Bazin Revisited” – Donato Totaro

“A fertile tomb where the spirits of ancestors brood over the unbroken seeds of the future.” – Author Stephen Wright

Art of the Title: What was your approach to directing the end credit sequence? What were the first questions you had and how were the answers arrived at?

Jim Capobianco: Unlike our credits in the past, the main goal of the credits was to finish the story. To communicate that the humans were going to be okay. They would survive. It became a balancing act of telling the survival story, using art history to do it and to make sure things weren’t too distracting from the names themselves.

ATS: How did you go about developing story with Scott, under the aegis of Jim?

Alex Woo: It was a lot of brainstorming and research. We started by figuring out the different points of the re-civilization process of Earth 2.0 that we wanted to highlight. The early stuff was pretty straight-forward: the invention of fire, irrigation, agriculture, etc. Things got more complex the further along we got on the civilization track (division of labor, trade, development of architecture). We didn’t want earth 2.0 to follow the same destructive path that forced the humans to leave the planet in the first place. We ultimately decided that we would stop our depiction of the re-civilization process somewhere before the industrial revolution. I think the last thing we depict is the discovery of electricity. Once we figured out which milestones we wanted to hit, it just became a matter of finding the connective tissue between those points.

ATS: What were your references? Why were these eras chosen?

JC: Andrew told us to make it as if you opened one of those enormous art history books we all had as art students. The difficulty was in what art to show, how to integrate it into the narrative and then to keep the animation economical. We knew from Kevin O’Brien’s beat boards that we would start with cave paintings but in Kevo’s initial pitch of the idea the art was all over the place. So we had to figure out timeline wise how to proceed. We soon realized that about the time of the Renaissance, art becomes associated with particular artists and more specific to that artist.

Before that it is easier to generalize the art. Some Egyptologist might be able to tell you who created certain Hieroglyphs but the audience is just going to lump together Egyptian Hieroglyphs. They are graphic, the greek pottery and mosaics also very graphic and lent themselves to a stylized simple form of animation but once you get into the renaissance everyone is saying that is Da Vinci or Michelangelo and things get complicated. You begin to ask yourself, “Are we saying that the Axiom Humans had another Da Vinci?” And it gets worse the more modern you get. So we started to refer to each section as a period and had to find an iconic style to represent that time in art which inevitably became associated with a famous artist of that time.

AW: Well, we were doing research along two different tracks. The first was researching the history of human civilization. For this, we used mostly the internet (Wikipedia!), and our own (limited) knowledge of history. The second track was the history of artistic expression. A lot of that reference came from art history books. I brought in an art history book that I had from college. Jim brought in a whole bunch of books from his own personal collection. It was a bit like doing a school project!

When we were choosing the eras, we tried to match the developments of Earth 2.0 with the developments of artistic expression in our history (Earth 1.0). So, for example, the development of fire in Earth 2.0 was depicted with cave painting, the earliest form of artistic expression from Earth 1.0. One problem we ran into was that there wasn’t always a direct correlation between a development in civilization and a distinct form of artistic expression. For example, the invention of irrigation occurred around the 6th millennium BC, but we used Greek Pottery from 5th Century BC to depict it. The way we got around this was to assume that the developments in artistic expression in Earth 2.0 would only very loosely follow the path that it took in Earth 1.0.

ATS: Why is 2D animation such a highly regarded way to end, and sometimes bookend, a 3D feature? As this is a recurring theme, do you get the sense of a potential resurgence in 2D features?

JC: The graphic nature of the text of the titles themselves lends to a more 2D approach I guess. The text is in 2D space so it is easy to imagine other 2D elements occupying that space and interacting with the text. 2D is also visually distinct from the CG feature so it may keep a few more people in their seats after the show is over to see something new. It is also I would imagine cheaper to execute. As far as will we see a resurgence of 2D features because there are a lot of 2D titles out there I don’t think they are one and the same. A 2D feature is definitely a viable way to make a film. It is a tool that has it strengths and does things CG just shouldn’t do or can’t do. And vice versa.

It’s just that someone is going to have to come along with a story told in 2D that just works so well in 2D. Perhaps a more graphic form of 2D. There is this film out in Ireland right now, The Secret of Kells and it looks tremendous, very graphic looking, stylized animation. Taking it’s design cue from illuminated manuscripts. I think this is they way things will go in 2D. 2D will come about again because it is the best way to tell that director’s vision of the story. Not necessarily that story! That is bullshit! I am tired of hearing the “Why would you animate that story?” It is about the design of how it is told. Look you could take a story like The Three Pigs and tell it in any form of animation or film for that matter these days and each form would give you a different feel for the same story.

Think about it you have photographs of boats, watercolors of boats, oils of boats, pastels of boats, computer images of boats they all say boat. Are some stories better suited to a certain medium? You bet. Toy Story works great in CG, obviously, probably not in hand drawn animation but it could have been done in live action with computers and pretty cool in stop motion! But it is done in CG and great in CG.

AW: I have no idea why it’s a highly regarded way to end a 3D feature. I actually don’t know if that’s an accurate description of 2D animation titles. I don’t think directors are choosing to do 2D animated titles because they’re ‘highly regarded’ or because it’s the popular thing to do. My guess is that it’s coming more from a place of a love for the art form and the aesthetic that 2D brings.

ATS: How does traditional animation influence your work?

JC: Huge. It is in my blood. I love it. Since I storyboard it influences how I depict a shot or board the character. I realized though that the animation I grew up on, that I went to school to learn and wanted to do is dead. It died long before CG usurped 2D. It passed away with the demise of the theatrical short. The animation at Warner Bros and the Disney stuff of the late 30’s , 40’s and Fifties, I am talking about. This was pure animation and the way those old guys thought about story was pure animation. It is hard to describe but they weren’t trying to get close to live-action or even the illusion of life they new the medium they were in and these guys knew how to milk it. I find the last two projects I had the good fortune to make have been my attempt to capture a little of that pure 2D animation.

AW: I LOVE traditional animation. It’s what got me into the world of animation and film in the first place. When I think of traditional animation, of GOOD traditional animation, I think of it as the foundation of what I’m doing now in 3D. It’s where I got all of my principles: design, composition, performance, timing, etc. For me, traditional animation formed the foundation from which I’ve built my understanding and love for film.

ATS: Do you begin working on the titles before story is finished?

JC: Nope, not in my experience. The titles are such an after thought it is almost like someone wakes up one morning in a cold sweat realizing that they hadn’t put any titles on their film and then it is hurry up get some credits on this thing! It is the nature of the beast, no one wants to think about the titles, they are too involved in getting a film done to attach to the credits. This hurts us a bit in artist resources and the time crunch but you learn to be flexible and resourceful. I actually kind of like it. I like being scrappy and being forced to figure out how to make the best of what I’ve got on hand.

ATS: How did you decide on the order of the painterly flourishes? How did you emulate the textures of the artwork?

JC: We landed early on with Van Gogh, Kevin had put WALL·E and EVE in this lush feeling Van Gogh and it felt to both Andrew and I that that was were we should end with the cards. It was a good depiction of the Earth’s vegetation fully back. We then worked backwards. Van Gogh is post-impressionist so naturally we had to have impressionist and Seurat seemed right, his idyllic sunday in the park. The period between flemish drawings and the impressionists was a bit difficult to figure out. We couldn’t really do anything super representational like Rembrandt. since every section was going to have some animation in it. It seemed we could get away with more if we could stay abstract. Like the earlier art forms lent themselves to.

So the painting sections became real nail biters. This goes back to art periods being represented by particular artists. Once you say okay this is going to be Turner like into Seurat like into Van Gogh like you now have to pull off these particular painting styles. We have very talented artist at Pixar, the best, but I didn’t know if the painter I would get would be able to pull this off. Maybe they could do one of the styles. But we persevered and we got John Lee who basically could be an art forger. I am so grateful for what he brought to the piece, he actually suggested Turner for the pre-impressionist painting. I was able to sleep again. As far as technique it was mostly done in photoshop. John is just a whiz with his tools. Really unbelievable.

ATS: What’s the ratio, if any, of traditional vs. digital in this piece?

AW: When you’re referring to traditional vs. digital, do you mean hand drawn vs. After Effects? I think the question assumes a dichotomy that doesn’t necessarily exist. All of the animation and the backgrounds in the titles were put together digitally, painted digitally, and timed digitally. There was a lot of hand drawn work in there (the actual frames of animation, and even some backgrounds Scott painted on real media and then scanned in to the computer and further manipulated it), but all of it went through some form of digital manipulation. I don’t know if I can give you a proper ratio.

ATS: Why the 8-bit style characters in the long credit roll?

JC: Originally we were talking about carrying the art history into the crawl with 20th century art – cubism, Pollock, etc. but then Alex and Scott Morse had the idea to design the crawl as 8-bit. At first I wasn’t sure the style would work after Van Gogh but I guess since the “they survive” narrative was done with the cards we had license to play with a new thing. I also didn’t know until it was pretty much irreversible if this would work with Peter Gabriel’s song. But it is amazing how our minds associate images with what information we are given, auditory, visual, and just makes a connection. We had such a success with the 8-bit Mountie in “Your Friend the Rat” (it always gets a laugh) it was fun to be in that world again and it struck me as funny that here you just watched a feature of probably the most advanced computer graphics around and we end it with the most primitive. All the characters were designed by Scott and then animated by Catherine Kelly in After Effects.

AW: Because it was so cool! We pitched three ideas for the credit roll, and one of them was the 8-bit version. We pitched them all to Andrew, and he picked the 8-bit one. There was a reference to Pong in the film, so we figured this would be the next step in the development of that gaming technology for them.

ATS: What does Pixar look for in an up and coming animator? Can you offer an example of a career trajectory within Pixar?

JC: Pixar looks for people who can tell a story with what they do. For an animator it could be a unique way someone may act a scene with a character. In story boarding, it could be an interesting sensible perhaps unique approach to the material. We are really interested in the individual artist and what s/he can bring to the films. We always want to see personal artwork in an artist’s portfolio. This way we can get a gage of what makes them tick, what their interests are.

ATS: Tell us a secret; something you use that works most, if not all of the time.

JC: Be brave enough to take educated risks and apologize after. I believe this is how you get really great, interesting unique stories and storytelling. Here is another for the price of one. Always move. Don’t sit around waiting for approval or something to happen. I have found there is always something to do on your project. Even if it is the smallest thing it keeps the momentum going and momentum is everything. By always moving it gets you that much closer to getting the project done and you stay ahead of the people who feel it is there job to judge and can put a stop to what you are trying to say before you’ve had a chance to say it. Like a shark keep moving or die.

AW: Hm… follow your instincts, but be very open to critical feedback. Truth is hard to hear sometimes, but it needs to be heard, because it’s truth!

ATS: What do you have on the horizon? What did you learn on WALL·E that you will take into future projects?

JC: At Pixar I’ve been bopping around helping out here and there. Outside of work I have been concentrating on some of my own projects. I have a short hand animated film titled “Leonardo” I am finishing after ten years of weekends and stolen time. That will be out in festivals hopefully this year and next. The look we achieved in the Renaissance section of the credits is reminiscent of how I am finishing the look of “Leonardo”. So it actually gave me the chance to see how to pull it together that way. I’ve learned so much working on these projects, Your Friend the Rat and WALL·E’s credits, it is hard to pin point one thing I would take forward. I really like the people I’ve worked with and some of the same crew came on to the credits from the short. Alex, Scott Morse, Bob Scott, Willy Hwang, Kirstophe Vergne, Chris O’Dowd, and I would work with them all again and again if given the chance.

“An intuitive editorial approach and the fantastic manipulation of reality led the way to a montage that hints at the disturbing truth about the people of Durham County.”

“Lost souls, between heaven and hell…”

Art of the Title: Take us through your design process, from the early inspirations to the development process (presentations) and final execution. Did you set goals or is it more of an organic process for you? How critical are you with your ideas? When do you know when something is right?

Edd Kargin: Initially the opening title sequences were intended to be classical – the words on the picture.

In the movie there were supposed to be animated insets (about 10 minutes in total), that’s why from the very beginning of the project we were working out the concept of the animation, but for lack of time, we had to refuse the animation during the movie. As a result of the work carried out we found a unique visual solution, and we felt sorry to throw it away. It was at this time we decided to use the creative power of these concepts in the opening title sequence of the movie. This was an excellent initial base.

It was very important for the director of the movie, Aleksander Melnik, to make the audience perceive in a special way this complicated and original movie, and that’s why he set the principal goals essential for the realization of his vision to the art-director and the supervisor. It was necessary to select various settings for saturating and developing the initial style: scenes switching, composition and the objects’ breakdown in the space, dynamics and rate of camera movement, color-scale etc. From the director’s wishes every possible solution was considered and transformed. As a result of strong cooperation and the thorough creativity of our team, all raised questions were solved quickly and the titles’ production was an efficient process.

ATS: How has your life and your former creative experiences informed this work?

EK: My experience as a supervisor comes from years of working as a TV designer, compositor and ЗD artist. I recognize the technologies and have been able to realize any suggested idea.

ATS: What are some of your favorite title sequences & designers…anything people on this side of the planet might not be familiar with?

EK: My first inspiration came from the main title sequence for HBO’s “Carnivàle.” I very much like the sense of style of studios MK-12 and PSYOP, especially if the work is done in 3D. In our country practically no one knows these companies. And the music video of The Prodigy’s “Spitfire” (see Extras) helped me to get the inspiration for the final stylization.

ATS: Do you have any interesting stories related the development of this sequence?

EK: We had little time for the work, that’s why for simplification and maximum flexibility of the pipeline we chose to work with a compositing program with plane 3D layers. There are no real 3D objects in the sequence. We built the world with plane layers. Nobody expected that the airplane would be so worked out in detail, it is virtually impossible to distinguish from models gathered in Maya.

ATS: What recent work has taken you by surprise?

EK: Well, the commercial failure of this movie was unexpected. Unfortunately the film turned out to be so turbid and gloomy that the audience couldn’t appreciate it.

ATS: Tell me, who are the artists involved with what we’ve called the Boschian frame? How do you get inspired to render the dark pools of humanities’ conscience?

EK: Concept designer and art director Yuri Pronin (a former designer of the famous animation studio “Pilot”) was developing the concept-art for the animated insets. These pieces were supposed to show an imaginary place that was called “the third area” – an area for the lost souls between the heaven and the hell. As a result of working with the director’s screenplay an artistic base was found: characters and objects cut out from a sheet of paper, the surroundings must remind one of the stylistics of the Christian church icons (a few looking like Bosch’s style). The color scale is mainly difficult and gloomy; the texture – scratches, mud, rumpled dirty papers. The characters are deprived of humanity and are very rough. Afterward, Yuri adapted the created concepts to the title sequence and also prepared textures, backgrounds and other static art elements for the compositors and animators.

ATS: What was the process for working with the production team?

EK: As an ex-TV designer and compositor I am well acquainted with the process of CG production inside and out, that’s why I can easily find a common language with CG designers, suggest the ideas, and correct the process as efficiently as possible. Also a very talented animator/compositor, Platon Infanta-Arana, was working on this project and we understood each other very well.

ATS: What’s the most important thing you learned while creating this sequence? What is your favorite element of this sequence?

EK: The screenplay and the preproduction gave us main understanding of the movie’s concept. As a CG supervisor, I went through the shooting process and took part in the creation of the movie itself. It’s impossible to understand deeply the basis of style and temper of the story without this experience.

During the production of the sequence the cooperation between the director and designers was very important. My main task was to seek out the artistic solutions necessary for the director and designers. The most important thing in my work was realizing the director’s thoughts and transforming them into a visual language to give the designers a clear direction of the work. It was a success. The director was pleased.

In my opinion the best thing in this work is the combination of the various directions and forms into a complete style. I really like the final concept. Justin Cone, the editor of Motionographer.com and curator of 2009 year’s Promax/BDA State of Design show, will include our work in this special event as one of the cutting edge motion works from the past year.

ATS: What is next for you?

EK: Our studio has been searching for the next project now. We are hoping for new and interesting challenges. We are waiting for new proposals!

Art of the Title: How did you first become involved with developing stratacut?

David Daniels: I had this thing called Clay Town…I grew up in a family of four and I’m the youngest. We had a Sir Walter Raleigh coffee can left over from ancestors, perhaps grandparents, and it had clay in it. Mom set us up at the kitchen table and we started play-sculpting. I was five years old when we started this. We never put it away. For many hours each day Clay Town consumed the kitchen table. We did this from the age of five all the way through high school.

My older sister was enacting marriages and soap operas, someone was cheating on someone else, with these little blobs of plasticine. My other sister, Shelly, would sculpt and she was very good. Incidentally, she later sculpted Jack Skellington for the film The Nightmare Before Christmas and also did some of the early work at Pixar (Toy Story).

What led to stratacut took place around the age of seven. It was a birthday party and we made a cake out of yellow and blue clay. We cut the cake and I looked at the pieces and thought, okay, it’s all there. It’s quite beautiful and quite clean and I’m going to do something with that one day.

ATS: Are you animating anything at this age?

DD: It was all sculpture at this point. That is part of the reason I got into filmmaking. Clay absorbs any kind of dirt or lint or punctures or any kind of rough treatment. The plasticine gets very dirty and doesn’t last. So I have all these really neat clay sculptures but cannot show it to anybody because by the time it has been put into a presentation it has gotten dusty and limp and a little funky.

Stratacut is a reinvention of the sculpture in a way because when you slice it open you get a clean slice so you are always revealing something fresh and, in a sense, not damaged. Stratacut-in-filmmaking preserves that. I began to animate and animation led me to filmmaking and filmmaking leads to storytelling and storytelling has lead me to shooting live-action and mixed media.

I did my first animation at the age of thirteen and won an award called Cine Media Five which was put out by Kodak and the Broadway department stores and they brought me to New York and put me in the Plaza Hotel and gave me a thousand bucks and that was the beginning of the addiction. “Hey! This is the lifestyle I’m going to want to live someday, I’m going to keep making these movies.”

ATS: The how-to stratacut animation video is fascinating (see Extras). Do you have a series of these videos for your work?

DD: There is no creative behind-the-scenes for each one. The video you have was done in either 1992 or ’93. I do have ten hours of extensive how-to footage I did in 2000 from a stratacut class I held at my studio for people who were interested. I went over every trick or technique or approach and tried to show whatever I had learned and developed and was worth passing on. It’s all digitized now and I keep swearing I’ll edit it down to 90 minutes.

I left the stratacut story at age eight and picked up at age twenty-two. And I did nothing with it between that time. I worked in traditional animation and stop motion and filmmaking at San Francisco State. After I graduated, I had a summer off and it was an unusual summer in that I didn’t have any real obligations. I met a girl who had an apartment and was away most of the time and I was able to try to figure out how stratacut works. I sat and cut everything I could think of in every direction in a very reverse-engineering kind of way and calculated the ways the image would animate. “If you put a series of sliced frames together and twisted it in this direction then this is the result.” After a while you realize it is motion sculpture; a different way to describe stratacut is motion sculpture.

Stratacut is the revealed technique in a way but what you are really doing is sculpting time. You are creating these blobby-spaghetti extrusions with a lot of distortions in them. You are calculating how they will be revealed in time. The potential energy that has been sculpted into them is revealed as kinetic energy once it is cut apart. So I tried to figure out all the possible geometric principals on which the twisting of the shapes would yield the ideal result; the blinking eyes, rotating faces, walking, etc.

I then went to California Institute of the Arts for my masters. My thesis project was the visual onslaught of Buzz Box – where I sort of took television through the sieve of stratacut and tried to regurgitate it so that hopefully people could see their own over-consumption anew as if you were viewing alien broadcasts through stratacut and it showed you 100 hours of TV jammed into fifteen minutes. That was Buzz Box. It was trying to force an audience to face overload in a structuralist film sort of as a way to come to grips with the fact…I was trying to seduce and abuse them at the same time. It was very hypnotic and very sensual but also aggressive and angry because it is trying to keep your attention at all costs. To me television and cinema do that; they give you a little bit of story and then jams advertising or the excitement of bullets and guns at you anything that can grab your attention in a visceral way.

I ended up in New York on Pee Wee’s Playhouse. The director, Stephen R. Johnson, also did a Peter Gabriel rock video, “Big Time.” He had seen Buzz Box my student film. It got passed around a lot. I was told it was circulated around the UCLA dorms on a VHS dub from ¾ inch tape as some underground let’s-smoke-pot kind of evening of entertainment.

ATS: How did you become involved with Freaked?

DD: Alex Winter was an associate of Tom Stern who also had a show on MTV at time named Idiot Box. John Payson at MTV was in charge of a lot of interstitial material and had hired me for a number of projects including Idiot Box.

The crew from Freaked had $18,000 in the budget for the title sequence and about three weeks. The primary animators were Michael O’Donnell, Galen Beals and myself. Michael and Galen sous chef for me; sous chefing is when you are prepping the ‘strips of bacon’ or the ‘sandwiches’ or the layered-up clay -doing the parts that allow me to throw everything together in a more organized way to be able to create all these faces and strange things. And a number of those shots were done by them as animators. They gave me a series of faces that were in the film so I worked on variations of those faces. I put a self-portrait in there. That was my one request (laughs).

ATS: How did you start breaking that sequence down? Were you given an idea by the directors or were you given free reign?

DD: It was free reign. There was Blind Idiot God, which was a great soundtrack. And part of that was my manic-obsessive style, trying to attack. And the style is very Buzz Box. I’m slicing the clay but I am also strobing the lights. Often I am putting the light on rotating rig, this is something I started doing in 1982 with Buzz Box. I would throw a light and put it in four different positions on four different frames continually to get the sense of something rotating around your sculpture while it is being cut away. This assaults your eye on every sixth frame basis. This does not attack the front surface -that has been lit well enough so you are getting a clean enough image that is not all over the place. This technique gives the sides energy and relief.

I would often put various background stratacut that were laid down ‘bacon strips’ on a piece of 4×4 plywood and I would shift that around completely randomly underneath so the background would have its own static energy. Everything was an in-camera matte. There were no special effects, there was no time to do any optical printing. The sculpture is put on glass; sometimes there are two or three layers of glass underneath that; it’s a crude version of an old Disney multi-plane camera. At Cal Arts, for Buzz Box, I had to use the 16mm Oxberry which was based on a down-shooter camera.

That allows support to the clay which is heavy and has a tendency to sag. Think of a Mayan temple rising upward with a shallow slope. Imagine the camera above the temple looking down on it. This allows you to keep the aspect ratio of what the limbs would be doing and I am trying to ensure the clay can support its own weight. Having one or two levels of glass to have things going on underneath to create a kinetic graphic overload. We did use 3D elements as well, using razor blades and knives and real objects because that makes it more exciting for lighting and you don’t know what textural intensity to expect. That keeps the surprises going.

ATS: At one point you used celluloid for hair.

DD: Exactly, celluloid for hair. Some of that was me and some of that Michael O’Donnell and some was Galen Beals. I was directing it stylistically but it was a group effort.

ATS: Did you have the Blind Idiot God/Henry Rollins track beforehand?

DD: It came first and I edited the piece to that song. The song itself is so crazy that it wasn’t any trouble for the intensity and the images to go together. I was trying for larger edit arcs in the music, I never micromanaged it down to the infinitesimal beats. When I agreed to the project they handed me this high energy song and I knew this would work well with my material.

ATS: In terms of mapping out the action, do you work from boards?

DD: No, the great thing about the Freaked sculptures is that they were more progression/explosion sculptures. I would begin at the bottom where I would have a face I was aiming toward and then I would build jazz free-form as I went higher up. I already had the Worm-Man and the other character’s from the film and built from those [end frames].

Those kinds of stratacut are easier to do. I did a Sesame Street piece that was “1 – 40″ that had rotating numbers going on. Doing pieces that actually rotate in space that change their two dimensional position, from one side of the camera to the other but is built into the block, is much more difficult to do and you have to think it out very clearly. But I’m not story boarding much of anything. Sometimes I’ll draw a paint-by-numbers look of something. As I’m sous-chefing the materials I’m going to work with, essentially I’m making my palate like a painter has his colors I need to create a table-full of twisted log “colors” that are gradients; one part brown, two parts red, three parts white and so forth. I’m staggering the gradients so that they all live in a different kind of textual twist or a different kind of Seurat or Van Gogh pixelation, they all have to live at a particlized level but they also can go from pure white to pure black.

After I’ve sous-chefed I’m painting by numbers where I am creating the shadow for the cheek and the highlights for the brows and working on the light side of the face and the dark side of the face. So I would sketch if I had a character I was trying to work toward. I would spend 15 minutes working on a thumbnail to make sure the gradients came out right. There is an Impressionist-inspired result.

Clay comes in about twenty colors. It is possible to mix colors using a double boiler, which is a pot of water with another pot inside. You put the clay in and mix a pure color from that. It’s a lot of time and effort. Which is one of the reasons I’ve developed a kind of Oaxacan-influenced primary color clash.

The process is like juggling fireworks. You want everything as loud as possible in all different ways and yet have a coherent strategy.

ATS: In Freaked there is a lot of smearing going on.

DD: That’s right. Imagine the lens as being about three feet above the animated action. I have the sheet of glass that is going to smash the image already in front of the lens for the entire process. It has to be there is a one-quarter or one-half f/stop optical density to the glass. Only at the moment where I’ve animated all the way down, I place a light bulb under the last frame of stratacut. I let it heat up and watch it carefully and when it is ready I lower the glass and smash it really slowly. I am animating, it isn’t really live-action…it’s a kind of Tai chi live-action where you take the shot and you let it melt a little more, and you smash it just a little bit harder, and it’s slowly puddling out and you are slowly twisting the glass and you are trying to raise the heat underneath. I’m glad you noticed that, it’s fun to smear.

Here is one way to think of the reverse engineering aspect of the work; if you were to take classic animation where you take key frames where say a Disney animator would take four frames to define key action, the in-betweener will come in for the in-betweens, but the key animator will only draw the significant action over time. So the key is gapping four or five frames out of the whole thing. It’s a four dimensional space seen in a three dimensions. Time is simultaneous to itself. The beginning, middle and end all coexist at once and what we are seeing is what we, as human beings cannot; ourselves in extruded time. Time is this slice that we tick by at but truthfully we are extruded pieces of spaghetti -much like stratacut- where we blob and shift and move and run. All our time pieces are connected but we can’t see them and don’t know it. In a sense I’m putting those pieces together and giving you a sculpture of that time.

ATS: In the video you said you wanted to start animating with a pasta extruder and you gave an example for the stretch and smear effect. How did that develop for you and do you have any new techniques to share?

DD: Wow, that’s a great point. You know, life is full of many dreams and in some ways dreaming them are more fun than doing them (laughs). Sometimes I will put a score along the extruded edge and have registration marks and you don’t see them. They’re tiny little dots and I can line things up after the fact because there are tiny pieces of clay that run the whole length. They’re not visually significant, you can’t tell they’re there and I can use them as registration marks to kinda line them up but it doesn’t always work because there is internal distortions inside of each slice depending on how the knife cuts it and the kind of surface tension of the knife as it goes through it that doesn’t allow it to be repeatable internally.

So I would use that and use that pasta extruder to try to lay them out and re-align it. I think with modern software, like After Effects and other digital tools, it give you a cheap way to correct it after the fact. In 1992 when I did that video it would have been a very expensive post suite to sit there and reposition every single frame properly.

The reason that I feel Blind Idiot God and Freaked looked good is because it was happening under the camera as a performance piece in some degree and there is a dimensionality aspect to some degree that’s actually part of what makes it interesting.

The front surface is only half of what’s interesting about it, it’s the contours in the sides and all the other stuff that’s actually sculptural that to me is very important to give you the feeling of the entire event as it’s happening. The downside of doing a series of extruded pieces and then doing them after the fact is that if you do it really well people will say it’s a video effect. They’ll say the computer did that (laughs).

ATS: How controlled is it? Do accidents happen when you’re animating it?

DD: Nothing ever comes out where I think that shouldn’t have come out, but I do think it’s like jazz improvisation. You’re working with a series of core structures and you know you’re going to go through a series of emotional parts of your piece but you don’t know every note. I intentionally leave crudeness in the mix, I could control it more, and I choose not to because it is less interesting to look at. It becomes to controlled and too tame and then the muscular, electrical effect of the natural stuff happening when it’s a little bit large, a little bit crude and a little bit random is more interesting than when it’s truncated and controlled.

It’s a wrestling match of trying to bottle lightning and not wanted to loose the randomness of it, but you also want to control it. There’s never really been something where I go ‘How the hell did that happen?’ it’s more ‘Oh, I’ve put in this design filled with a percentage of randomness and it came out beautifully.’

ATS: There’s a real fury to a lot of what you’re doing. Where does the madness come from?

DD: People meet me and they think I should be more ragged and more crazy than I look. I’m pretty low key and normal on first handshake. But I had a lot of anger about life on the cosmic level, on the practical level, on the human level. There are a lot of philosophical things that eat me. I grew up during Richard Nixon and the Vietnam war and then just as things started to look like they weren’t as bad as I thought they were, we all got Ronald Reagan and the machinery of deceit that his minions perfected. That’s just a small issue though, the real problem is that I’m alive and I’m going to die in a short time like every destiny before me, and I knew that from the age of four. You could see that everybody was an adult, struggling with details that don’t really matter, and I’m an adult now which is really tragic.

[I saw people] go through their life issues bound by their biological and earthly tethers and they couldn’t really lift off this sphere to be at one with something much larger than themselves. And then I grew up to be that. I knew I would, I knew I couldn’t stop it. There’s a certain tragedy in all that, so what you’re seeing is a lot of inner anger from not wanting to sell out and not wanting to become what I knew was ahead of me. And from the frustration of trying to shout at the top of my lungs in an artistic way to say there’s something on the other side here. The patterns of what we make of our lives are so small yet we make so much of them. It’s metaphysical. I’m mad at God for having me born 200 years too early because I have an odd, non mainstream way of looking at the world and yet I do not have a medium to express it with. This is all I could do to sort of explain through time/space extrusion experiments, if you will. It dooms us to be a piece of spaghetti at the beginning of our lives and a piece of boiled pasta and the end and we really can’t break out of it.

I feel like an ant talking to a lot of other ants saying there is something so much greater out there that we all need to be looking for, to try to understand. It’s really very difficult because the instrument we are given is our brain and the body we have and it’s a beautiful thing. I mean I really love life and I’m one of the most optimistic pessimists you’ll ever find, but I am very angry that more is not done with the life we’re given in the sense of the patterning and the stupidity with which we live our lives on some level. I have gained a little more patience and lessened what I expect of everything at this point, it comes with age.

ATS: Would you care to list any influences in animation and also apart from animation?

DD:That’s tough. I’ll tell you, after the fact people told me about Oskar Fischinger but I was never really into him. I did like his puppettoons, but you know he did some wax cut stuff that I never really knew about until long after my work began to be seen. I really had no clues from any predecessor, so it’s hard to give Oskar credit cause it had absolutely nothing to do with what I was doing. His stuff is pattern based and primitive.

The problem with pointing out influences is that you’re prioritizing certain people over others and there’s so many of them that did such a small part of everything!

ATS: So at the beginning of the interview you mentioned that you moved away from stratacut, so what are you working on now? What gets you up in the morning?

DD: I have a family and I run a business. Family brings serious adult responsibility and so I sort of took the easy way out. I would love to do actual sculptures that use pottery clay or a form of plastic and create things that would sit on your coffee table or could be very large that are the motion sculptures themselves. I would never cut them up but would put some kind of magnetic filament into them and MRI the things and sell them as gallery pieces. You’re looking at time from the outside. That’s my gift, I see time from the outside and I see motion sculpture and see how the pieces all flow together and we’re a part of all that. So when you see these things as sculpted things from the side that’s when they’re the most beautiful. Showing something that nobody sees is to me a revelation and an artistic triumph. My medium is a transitory puddle of goo (laughs), so you just can’t sell it. The only reason you do the MRI is to prove the fact that you didn’t cheat! ‘It’s in my mind and I know it’s there!’

I also consider CG. It is the ultimate chameleon. It can be anything including what I do but I do think I could use many of the things I’ve developed in my mind…this is what I mean about being born 200 years too early. There are so many things to communicate and I cannot even begin the process but I feel my mind is trained to do just that. It is there but I don’t have the resources on a technical level to actually show them. I would have to make or work with programmers to make my own tools but in a sense I’ve been too lazy and I could have taken a more artistic road and actually gone that way. These are mediums and techniques I don’t understand enough to actually do.

Also, agencies and creatives have become scared to some degree of what they can get away with. When I was doing this in what I would call the heyday of the 80s and 90s there was actually more openness to unusual things and to the possibility of a random outcome. They’re very scared on random outcomes now, they want control because everybody’s afraid, so I’m not getting as many, in a sense, pieces of commissioned work. These are all reasons why I’ve been away from stratacut but it is my natural talent and I should go back to it. Many people can run a company, lot’s of people can make good or even great commercials, a great pool of talent already does the things I do all day long. I’m just perhaps a little bit of a coward because it would require economic and personal sacrifice to take that dream to that level, but I may be lucky in the next year or two and have enough financial cushion and just stop what I’m doing and go back to being a less angry, less crazy person but more of an artist who’s trying to find something in the work and hopefully that work speaks to people.

It’s a little bit of a thrill when somebody’s done something unusual. That’s one pleasing part about being a human being that we have enough resources and abundant surplus value, if you’re going to look at it as a Marxist…5% of the world does all the essential life support functions, and 95% must fill there time being lawyers, IRS agents, bloggers and artists. Time is filled with activity, because so much has been produced ahead of our real needs.

People who inspired me? Einstein, Hegel, Herman Hess, Krishnamurti, Carlos Castaneda even though I think he’s full of shit but I read the books when I was young and they were fun (laughs). Artistically Kandinsky, Munch, and first round of expressionist anger and the neo-expressionist painting in the 80’s and graphics, like RAW magazine. Chihuly is very pleasant, I think Gehry is very good. People are doing these undulating shapes that are very interesting. It’s quite intimidating, the level of completeness in many people’s work is so well thought out and so good. Van Gough and the impressionists obviously made a big early impact when I was young. The Beatles, Menomena, Viva Voce, Peter Gabriel.

I do think that it’s an unusual gift and I haven’t given it the service I should have in finishing out the dream. The story is only half told at this point and it’s a little scary to go back and do the other half because it’s probably going to be much harder than the first half to finish.

“This title sequence, to a BBC 1 prime time drama based in a law firm and centred around it’s main character Fish, played by Paul McCann, was specially shot 16mm and uses film of ink spiralling into water which was then composited against animating typography of the cast to create a simple, sophisticated and classic filmic sequence.”

It was made using pure undiluted ink in water. The movement comes from simply stirring the water in a cylindrical tank. It was shot on a fixed 16mm Bolex camera and telecined to digital format for grading and editing. The frame rate was a mixture – between 25 and 60 frames a second. It’s the luck of the draw which way the ink is going to go and how it spreads, but that’s the beauty. Simple and no need for fluid fx!

“A group of old friends whose lives are thrown into chaos when one of their group commits suicide.

Despite it’s 2D appearance the sequence was animated in Maya not only to give the animator greater control of the characters and environment, but also to add fluidity and personality to the spheres. As the turn around time for the sequence was just a little longer than it takes to make a cup of tea, an added benefit of animating in Maya was that we could quickly render in HD.”

Art of the Title: How did you initially become involved with “The Incredible Hulk”?

Kyle Cooper: Well, I hadn’t worked with director Louis Leterrier before, but I have worked with Marvel quite a bit. I designed the Marvel logo comic animation with Avi Arad, and I designed all three Spider-Man titles. Our company, Prologue, also created titles and VFX for Iron Man. In addition, I knew Gale Anne Hurd, who was a producer on both Hulk films, so they called me in at the outset. We met with Marvel and discussed the challenges. Louis had shot several different openings. In one alternative for example, Edward Norton was up on a mountaintop, consumed with guilt for having hurt Betty Ross, and planning to shoot himself in order to keep others safe.

The initial idea for the opening was to create a prologue that included Banner’s backstory. It was an idea that I liked quite a bit. In fact, one of the two reasons I called my second company Prologue is that I feel if a title sequence is done well, it can often serve as the first scene, or as a prologue to the story you are about to see. Studios quite often are having test screenings and realizing that a prologue is needed and calling us. I took the names of both my companies, Imaginary Forces, and Prologue, from the prologue of Henry V. So the idea of laying the groundwork for the story which is about to follow is something that I have always been interested in. In literature as well as film. The title sequence can create an introduction, or relay the back story of a film, the idea of condensing the films themes and the characters obsessions is an interesting challenge.

For the Hulk, the primary goal was to tell the origin story in a prologue, rather than spending time on the expository during the film as Ang Lee had done. We approached the problem in various ways. We tried creating a prologue, and having the credit sequence at the end. We tried having some credits mixed with the prologue, and the rest at the end. Ultimately, I proposed integrating the credits fully into an opening that would serve as the main title as well as encapsulating Banner’s story.

I know it was a lot to ask. Often times if a director puts the credits at the end of a film, then he will just have a simple presenter card with the main title at the front. But for Hulk, we needed another element – a separate sequence to set up the story. In the past, test screening audiences have sometimes indicated that they were not clear on certain aspects of a film that could have been explained in a prologue. And yet, most of the time integrating or inter-cutting the credits with a prologue is not considered. It is often assumed that this approach would end up trying to convey too much information – that reading the credits demands a certain amount of time, and that trying to tell a story while this is happening would generate confusion. But I always say, “Let us try.” And I did that here. So I directed a second shoot with soldiers kicking lab doors down, looking for Bruce Banner, searching for clues, and discovering experiments left behind in old motel rooms long since abandoned. We generated a lot of great footage from the shoot which ultimately enabled us to tell the story in a concise and engaging way.

ATS: So how much of the production footage was already shot and brought to you and how much did you create?

KC: We did use some footage provided by Marvel, but they didn’t just bring it to us and say, “Here use this.” Normally I ask for what I want to use. I ask a client what they have. I go through all the out-takes and dailies. Then I request the footage I am interested in working with and start to edit with that. Sometimes we can do a second unit shoot to fill in where the sequence is lacking, but often times this is not possible due to budget concerns. It just depends on the project. For the Hulk, we were lucky enough to have both.

In the final sequence, there are shots of General Ross looking at the maps and smoking a cigar. There are shots that were turned into surveillance footage, as well as a wall of photographs and information being studied by General Ross. It’s all about the hunt. Where he’s been. What he’s done. In many ways the sequence follows the path of the Hulk’s destruction around the globe from Ross’s perspective. Banner becomes the Hulk, hurts Betty, and the hunt is on with Ross following close behind.

So the wall we built essentially became the documentation of that hunt. The central element was a large map where Ross had tracked all the sightings of the Hulk, and stemming out from these locations were all the materials collected from that location. We spent a lot of time on research for this section, looking for images of destruction, rage, fear; looking for and creating images that would suggest the presence of something that was no longer there. We wanted to create the feeling that you had always just missed the moment – that you were always one step behind, one moment too late; leaving you with nothing but the aftermath. A destroyed pick-up truck, a blurry image from a CCTV camera, the dusty remains of a homemade laboratory. We created all kinds of medical reports and police records. We generated a full background report on each of the Hulk’s known associates, then linked them together on the wall, showing how all the connection’s were interwoven.

We didn’t just want to create the illusion of large-scale wall with endless amounts of data and images. We could have done that by generating small-scale setups for each shot. But we wanted it to be real, so we built it full scale. And in fact, we had to rebuild it several times over the course of the project, photographing it extensively during the development of the sequence, and then doing the final build on set for the shoot.

The scene in the hospital, on the other hand, was shot by the director, but it wasn’t put together as a sequence, it was just raw footage. A lot of what I wind up doing is editing and figuring out how to simplify. Initially, they had shot an origin piece, which they had cut a number of different ways, but it was long and the story wasn’t clear enough. It did prove to be a good foundation, however, so we essentially began with that and developed the story from there.

In fact, the television show with Bill Bixby also had an origin story in the opening credits and I think Louis felt that the approach was an interesting one. Although I don’t want to speak for him, I think some of what they shot tipped its cap to that original opening, and nicely so: Banner being in the chair, doing experiments, Betty looking through the glass, and, of course, the transformation. But they didn’t want to reveal too much of him in that scene, just as we hadn’t wanted to show him clearly in the images of the hunt. They didn’t want to give him away before the movie even started. So we had to come up with ways of getting around that – ways of showing the Hulk without revealing too much. We filmed high-speed close-ups of shirts ripping and seams coming apart. We used the camera to shoot close-ups of teeth, to follow veins down an arm, or inside an eyeball, then used those veins as a way of transitioning into lines on the map, always hinting, always working to heighten the sense of urgency and mystery without being too explicit. We even worked on an over-the-shoulder shot of the Hulk standing up from his chair, shot from the Hulk’s POV and using an effect to create the Hulk-vision similar to the old TV show.

ATS: Do you emphasize incorporating elements of the comic, TV series, or this film itself when you work or do those elements and themes rear themselves? (In other words, do you have a list of elements you want to use?)

KC: I do a lot of research. I had not read The Hulk comics in a number of years but I read them a lot when I was growing up. I had all The Hulk comics, and the entire first set of The Hulk and Submariner comics, so I certainly knew the story. I was kind of a hardcore Marvel Universe guy. Growing up, my brother and I had 6000 comics. We even had The Amazing Spider-Man #1 but my mother threw it away because she would do that if we left them out on the floor, she also would not let us watch The Three Stooges, you know how mothers are. I loved the Hulk, I loved the Fantastic Four, and I feel lucky that they have all come back to me working on these projects.

But for a comic, as with any main title, the first stage is always research. I read the script. I find out everything I can. I listen to the director and watch the movie. Then I try to figure out how to best answer the brief. We wanted to get right into the movie by telling the origin story in the credit sequence, and yet the story we needed to tell was extremely important. I didn’t want to walk into this with the attitude that we just needed to get the origin story out of the way fast so the real movie could start. I wanted it to be an essential part of the film, to add another layer of meaning to the overall script. Everyone thought it would be a very difficult thing to do. In fact, I was really surprised at the number of people who wrote about the title sequence online and in the press. I actually put a lot of those quotes on our website because it was wild to me how many people mentioned that the origin story was done in the opening credits. I didn’t understand why that struck people. To me, it always seemed possible. And more than that, it seemed natural. It always just seemed like the right thing to do, although looking back, I guess it was a challenge.

I went to the first Hulk premiere with Garson who was the title designer for that film. Garson and I are old friends. We went to school together, and I hired him at R/Greenberg Associates in New York. I had met with Ang Lee about doing the first film, but Garson got the project that time. The two movies had some of the same producers, but they didn’t want to do it the same way, so I ended up doing the titles this time around.

ATS: You’ve also done the titles for the Spider-Man films, in what ways do the themes of a superhero film change your approach compared to other films you’ve worked on (if there is a difference?)

KC: I don’t think the process is any different. The tendency is to lean more towards something illustrative or animated. It is a different problem to solve, but I don’t approach it any differently. I like doing comics. I loved working on Spider-Man. There is a need to set up the story each time, to tell the audience where they are and what has happened before, although the first Spider-Man was a bit of an exception. For the first film we had more of a blank canvas, which enabled us to play more freely, coming up with visual metaphors and ideas that did not have to be tied to a narrative. I liked the idea of type being caught in a web and so that became a form of typographic wordplay that we used throughout. But in each of the subsequent films we had to tell the story of what happened in the last episode, so there again, the opening turned into a prologue, setting the stage for the next chapter in the story.

ATS: When did Craig Armstrong’s theme music become a part of the sequence? Did you have access from the start?

KC: When we first began doing editorial sketches, we did not have the music. We started by cutting to temp music, then as we progressed, Craig provided us with different pieces. He kept refining the music, making it better, and so we would modify the edit to his music as it developed.

This goes differently every time. Sometimes we get a piece of music like we did on Mission Impossible, where it already exists, but often times I pick the music I want to cut to and offer my opinion to the composer. Sometimes the rights to music used in the edit are obtained, but it can be a lengthy process. The composer is generally very proprietary about the title score, and prefers the opening to be his own music.

ATS: How do you work with members of the production team, in terms of participation? How many people worked on this sequence?

KC: There’s always someone who has to lead the team. For this project it was me. But people collaborate on different levels. There are animators, there are editors. Sometimes I’ll have more than one editor trying different things. For The Incredible Hulk there were two editors, at least three animators, and a full crew for the live action shoot. The team at Prologue built props for the shoot and everyone kind of rallied around the project.

For most films or commercials it seems like there is a team. I know these days you can have a one-man band, where a single designer can do his own boards, his own typography, can shoot his own footage and even do his own animation. But usually we have to work fast and having a team allows you to have each person dedicated to one thing. For myself, I’m usually working on a couple of things at once and function more like a director, which is what I really enjoy most.

ATS: What are some of your favorite elements from this sequence? You use live action, typography as well as still imagery, considering the whole range of media within your work this sequence seems to have most of what you like working with.

KC: Everything but the kitchen sink? Sergei Eisenstein talks about the “immutable fragment of actual reality.” It’s like breaking reality down into all its pieces and thinking about each frame as a singular composition – and each element within the composition of that frame as separate entity as well. You can break it down that far.

I try to go through each sequence frame by frame and not have any frames, or any sequences of frames, that I think are poorly color corrected or composed. So to answer your question – what did I like best about the Hulk?

Well, for the image gallery on our website I went through the sequence frame by frame and pulled the ones I liked the best. There are a couple of frames that could be made better, but the ones that I like are the ones I picked for the website. There is one frame that you cannot even see when it’s running in real time; a moment in which the seam of the Hulk’s shirt is tearing. I like the color correction on it. I like the composition. I think it’s beautiful even though it is depicting a violent moment. So that is an element I think is good even though you hardly see it. I also like the skeleton of Edward Norton’s face, just before the Hulk credit comes up. I like moments like that where you are seeing many things at once, many layers coming together to create a whole.

ATS: You mentioned filming eye veins and maps earlier, and that image really stood out when going though the end of the sequence frame by frame prior to this call.

KC: Thank you for reminding me of that. That would be the next one I would mention. I really like the idea of the veins of an eye becoming a map. He’s changing, but he’s also running away. It’s a very short moment, but as a frame, and as an idea, I really like it. It’s well composed. It’s beautiful, and it tells the story in a very quick and concise way. So those kinds of frames – those kinds of little details – perfection is made up of trifles. I’m not saying it’s perfect, but those kinds of trifles are interesting to me.

ATS: To have perfect moments within?

KC: Yes, and that’s maybe the argument for going through frame by frame. On the other hand, even if every frame is beautiful, if the animation isn’t choreographed in an interesting way or if it is not interesting to watch, but rather just a series of good looking frames – then it will not transcend the sum of its parts and become something more. There are so many choices. There is so much stock, and so many elements, and so many stills, and so many key frames. There is so much stuff going on in the sequence, in the office, in my life, I have to ask myself, “What do I do right now?” And the answer always seems to be, “Just focus on one little, small thing first.”

Art of the Title: How did you become involved with the project?

Garson Yu: It was six years ago. I had never worked with Ang Lee before Hulk 2003.
I was called to meet with Ang and producer Larry Franco. They met with me and with people from Imaginary Forces. I was picked by Ang to develop the visual look for the film. At the beginning, the project was not about the opening title sequence; Ang wanted to create a unique look for the film. He wanted me to develop a new visual language incorporating multiple cameras to tell a story. In film, it’s difficult to show multiple events simultaneously on one screen. Ang wanted to develop a concept that incorporated how we normally read comic strips. He wanted to present the film in one giant comic page. I was asked to do R & D on a technique to choreograph multiple image panels on screen. As it developed, my involvement on the film expanded to design the opening sequence.

ATS: What kind of collaboration was involved in creating the sequence?

GY: Ang was very busy shooting the principle photography with Fred Elmes, the DP, at the Universal Studios Lot. It was a very intense working schedule for him and his production crews. I started to develop the storyboard for the opening. It was not that easy. In the opening, he wanted to create a backstory that explains David Banner’s experiments in extracting DNA from other species, which turns him into the Hulk. A week after I presented the storyboard, the production manager called and said the producer wanted to start shooting the opening in San Francisco at the ILM stage in 2 days. I sent out a shot list, they prepped the shoot in a day and we started shooting the next day. I ended up spending 5 days shooting in San Francisco. All the major set ups were shot up in the bay area and we also did 2 days of pick up shots for all of Banner’s journals at our own studio. We started editing the offline in L.A. while Ang was still working at ILM. We sent quicktimes back and forth until we locked the picture. That was a 6 minute long sequence. The studio wanted to cut it to 3 minutes. All the VFX and animation were done at yU+Co. We had a team of about 6-8 artists working on the project.

ATS: Can you breakdown the development of the sequence? Were there differences between this and other yU+Co. projects?

GY: First we went through an R&D stage. We had two concerns: content, and design, meaning the look and feel. The content was defined by Ang, but it was my responsibility to determine how to tell the story. The sequence is divided into two parts. In the first, I wanted to compare a microscopic world to the larger universe in outer space. To me there is always a universe within a universe- a world within a world. There is a visual similarity between the two. I decided to start with a drop of water which represents the beginning of life. From that, the journey begins. I did research on the look of a DNA double helix. For this project, the research was very important. The studio had hired a science consultant, John Underkoffler, who helped me to make sure all the visuals I created were scientifically correct. He was also involved in developing the story with me. The animation of a cell dividing is all based on real science reference. My sequence takes us traveling down to double helix DNA level and from there we find the Hulk graphic logo at the end of the journey.

The second part of the sequence takes us on a journey through David Banner’s experiments, which take place over time. His experiments involve extracting DNA from four species to harness certain characteristics from each. He uses the jellyfish for luminescence, the starfish for regeneration, sea cucumber for tough skin, and the lizard for its resistance to poison. One of the greatest challenges in the sequence was to communicate complex information without voiceover. We had to explain the whole scientific process visually. To help with this, we shot tabletop inserts of Banner’s diary which were then intercut with the lab footage. Ang later decided to also use the diary shots during the movie to help tell the story.

This was no different from other yU+Co. projects. We always start with research and defining the creative direction, from there we will go through a design process defining the look and feel. Once the design and offline are approved then we go into final production.

ATS: Were you responsible for the custom Marvel logo?

GY: Yes I was responsible for the custom Marvel logo. Ang wanted to replace all the comic pictures with The Hulk images.

ATS: Were you able to reference Danny Elfman’s theme music? If so, how did it influence the sequence?

GY: I must say Danny’s theme music was influenced by my temp music that I put together with my composer friend Walter Werzowa. The original music sketch was more fragmented. I used Walter’s music to edit my picture. Danny followed our picture and music to recompose his version of the theme music. He scored to my picture.

ATS: Was the type design always integrated? Were the scenes shot and edited with the title placement already in mind?

GY: Yes the scenes were shot with the placement of the titles in mind. I wanted to integrate the typography with the picture, reacting and interacting with the physical environment. I didn’t have time to plan everything before I went to San Francisco so I had to improvise a lot on set. A lot of design decisions were made in the post production stage because of that. The typography is a custom font designed to recall the movie’s comic book origins.

ATS: Do you have any interesting stories related to this sequence?

GY: Shooting on a tight schedule was pretty stressful. I got to the set for an 8am call and I had all the producers behind me watching over my shoulder waiting for me to give direction to my crew. I had to make quick decisions to tell my DP and AD what to do. I think I smoked at least 10 packs of cigarettes for those 5 days in San Francisco.

ATS: Is there someone relatively new whose work has taken you by surprise?

GY: There are so many young talents out there. Their work always surprises me. There is a Japanese saying: “The flow of the river is ceaseless and its water is never the same.” There are always fresh perspectives and new talents. Design never stops evolving.

ATS: What inspires you these days?

GY: My inspiration usually comes from everyday life observation. I think I’m like other artists. Everything around us affects our thinking: our life experience, our memories of the past, our dreams for our future, our imagination at any moment in time. I guess everything from music, literature, art, films, TV, internet, pop culture, dancing, architecture, my kids, my dogs… everything around me inspires me.

Next Week: Kyle Cooper of Prologue anatomizes “The Incredible Hulk.”

“Hulk is big…[so] I wanted to do something in a micro fashion to compare big and small.

I thought that maybe David Banner was trying to trace it back to the beginning [to try to find] that moment where cells begin to have feeling. The objects [he studies] are the beginning.”

Art of the Title: What was your inspiration for such an original opening?

Anna Muylaert: From the first draft of the script I had this idea of showing Durval Discos’s environment with all the words that we have to read while walking through the city. Later, when in production, we studied many sequences, including Orson Welles and Spike Lee’s long shots.

ATS: How long did this sequence take to execute? How many takes did you do?

AM: This sequence was treated like a short film inside the film. We rehearsed it many times, over one month. We chose the city block where it would be done and started experimenting. I used a video camera and walkman and walked the whole way, feeling the music and choosing good places to put the names. Then we would look at it together with the crew, and the art director would give me the ideas of the places we could place the credits (the concept was to put the names in places where there normally would be something written; the names should not shine on screen, they were to be just part of the city.)

After a number of these sessions we finalized the shot.

Against the wishes of the production, I decided not to close the street. I believed we could do it in a documentary way. My DP, Jacob Solitrenick told me he would do the shot as I wanted, but that it would only work if it was a cloudy day. Otherwise he could not make such wide aperture changes in one shot (because of the lighting differences between indoors and outdoors).

I wanted to take the risk. I trusted him.

On the day of the shooting, it was cloudy, so we were optimistic. It was a Saturday morning, so the street was not to crowded and everything seemed auspicious.

The art department put all the names in their places. I had to explain everything to the steadicam operator (who had not rehearsed anything). I ran beside him and directed him while he was doing his movements. Our major problem was the moment we needed to cross the street, but I told him that we would cross it not at a particular time, but just after seeing the key man.

We did a few rehearsals and shot. The first take was very good, but we decided do make a second one and that’s the one on screen. And that was it. Two shots.

The most beautiful thing to me about this shot is that many people on screen are not extras – just people walking on the street (exceptions: the skater, the couples kissing, the guy with the t-shirt in the game house, and our producer Maria Ionescu having coffee in the bar). Everyone else just appeared and didn’t look to the camera. Their “performances” were beautiful, like the woman we follow after the bar. These people came to the camera and disappeared forever…

“The main titles took us approximately four weeks of work. The directors asked us to create an animated open where the audience could understand the mood of the movie. The challenge was interesting because we did the credits as more of a sequence of the movie.”

“The films starts with the set up of the robbery of the armor plated truck and immediately continues to the titles which show the actual event of the gang, “Los Entendidos” (portrayed liked superheroes in comic book,) stealing the truck and escaping from the police.”

With the artist's literal descent over his own work, Lee Quiñones launches one of the great historical documents of hip-hop.

Here are the greats becoming great; Crazy Legs, the Rock Steady Crew and many more are to breakdancing what Grandmaster Flash and Grandmaster Caz and many more are to turntablism what Double Trouble and many more are to MCing what Lee and Zephyr and many more are to graffiti.

The opening title animation is a celebration of graff writers and the subcultures they travel in. Everyone riding the "Wild Style" train conducted by director Charlie Ahearn.

Art of the Title: Were you involved with animation previously?

Zephyr: No. The “Wild Style” animation project was my introduction, although I used to make flip books.

ATS: How did you develop and mix the various artistic styles (the “Wild Style” morphing, “Rap,” "Break,” “Pop”)?

Z: Charlie Ahearn was a great director. He had very specific ideas about everything in the film, and was closely involved in developing the aesthetic of the art in the opening sequence. The graffiti styles used for the words “Rap”, “Break” and “Pop” were all variations of things I was doing on walls and trains at the time. There is a generic quality to my graffiti, but there is also something very distinct about my graffiti work. Maybe that sounds like a contradiction, but graffiti writers will always recognize my stuff immediately. I would say that the different lettering forms were guided by Charlie, but they are definitely “Zephyr-style”. It’s weird to be talking about this now. It seems like a million years ago…

ATS: At what point was the sequence created? The star at the end of the sequence is an interesting example of the iconography of the film.

Z: The live footage already existed, so we modeled the animation to dissolve smoothly into the live footage.

ATS: How did you mold the visuals to the music?

Z: Joey Ahlbum created a beat chart according to the soundtrack, and we worked from that.

ATS: How were you able to represent the styles of your peers and friends so well?

Z: I assume you’re referring to the train rolling by. That was easy. Copying other writers’ stuff comes pretty naturally to me, although writers will always execute their own signatures better than someone else will, of course. The train was cardboard, and it rolls by very quickly. If you saw it “frozen” you would see that I probably didn’t really do them justice. I think I did a “Bus” piece that was just plain lousy.

ATS: How did the idea of animating the graffiti come about? Are there other examples of this from this era?

Z: Charlie Ahearn had a vision. He wanted to bring “black book” drawings to life. He urged authenticity and rawness. He didn’t want it polished up. And no, this had never been done before.

ATS: What was it like collaborating with director Charlie Ahearn?

Z: It was fantastic. And I will forever be grateful to Charlie. I was a 19 year-old degenerate when Charlie approached me to work on the art for the movie. His faith in me helped me take myself a lot more seriously, as an artist and a person. I will always remember him as one of the people, early on, who recognized that I wanted to be accepted as an artist and not remain a perpetually stoned graffiti writer. Although being a perpetually stoned graffiti writer was definitely fun for a while!

ATS: How did this movie effect your life and graffiti writing career?

Z: It felt good to be working somewhere without barbed wire and cops. But I kept writing graffiti. Charlie Ahearn even came to the train yard with me twice.

ATS: How do writers reconcile street bombing and the avant-garde art scene?

Z: I don’t know. I don’t speak for writers.

ATS: How have you dealt with personal vs. commercial work, especially considering the roots and history of the medium.

Z: In the 1980’s I did a lot of commercial work. Now I refuse 99% of the offers I get, particularly the corporate ones. Graffiti has become so commercially co-opted it’s sickening. If making it that way is partly my doing, I'm embarrassed. That’s not the legacy I wanted.

ATS: What fueled the youth to bridge graffiti with the other dominant youth cultures of MCing, turntabalism and breaking? Why was the form primarily driven by the youth?

Z: Answering that properly would require about six pages. If you ever come to one of my college lectures, you may hear me discuss that subject since college kids get boners when you mention “hip-hop”. But let’s just say that the “organic/south bronx” hip-hop “elements” theory is a good story, kind of like Santa Claus.

Graffiti existed for a decade before “hip-hop” as we know it emerged. This is not the first case of art forms sweeping up and creating associations with other, pre-existing art forms. Graffiti was “anointed” the visual counterpart for rapping, breaking, etc. Most people simply accept that association, but many do not. Some graffiti artists (Blade and Pink, for example) reject the idea that graffiti is part of the hip-hop movement.

ATS: Did the old concept of graffiti-as-vandalism die? How is the perception different today for the people and those in the employ of the people?

Z: If a real outlaw gets a paid gig, then you have an authentic thing, but the silverware will get stolen. If someone who can draw cute graffiti on paper (or via computer) gets the gig, you have a happy art director.

ATS: Is there a kind of immortality in graffiti?

Z: I suppose so. When I die they’ll probably talk about me.

ATS: What or who inspires you these days?

Z: Same as always. Rick Griffin, Albrecht Dürer and Frank Zappa.