“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.”

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.

Art of the Title: How have your life and your former creative experiences informed this work?

Howard Nourmand: This project in particular was the result of something I went through early in my life–my struggles in elementary school. Back then sitting still in the classroom was torture. It wasn’t that I was mischievous or that I didn’t care about my grades. NOT AT ALL. I cared a lot, but for the life of me I couldn’t stay focused on the curriculum and my mind would wander.

My parents (who believed that a good education was priceless) put me through numerous developmental classes. Somewhere along the way I was sent to see an educational therapist. On our first or second session she pulled out a set of Rorschach cards. I remember being struck and mesmerized by them. “There is no right or wrong answer,” I was told. It was a big departure from all the other examinations I had taken. In a way I was interfacing with abstract art for the first time.

The crude and dated psychological tool always stayed with me. Twenty-three years later when I was racking my brain and trying to dream something up for The Dog Problem, it came to me while I was tossing and turning in my sleep. I had been looping in my head and putting a lot of pressure on myself to figure it out. It took a lot of questions to get there, and then, it hit me and woke me up.

ATS: What kind of response to the title sequence have you received to-date?

HN: The response we received from this title sequence exceeded all my expectations. It landed my company (Grande Jeté) on Apple’s homepage and opportunities sprung up from all over the place. We got a lot of exposure and people contacted us from all over the world.

ATS: Have you ever taken a look at the music video for Gnarls Barkley’s track, “Crazy”? It’s a nice complimentary piece to your sequence. What is your take on that video?

HN: Yes, of course. It really is a spectacular piece. It was a humbling experience for me because their music video was released first, just as we were putting the finishing touches on ours. Keep in mind that even after we finished we had to wait for our film to get distribution. The Dog Problem only showed on a few screens and did not get the exposure I thought it was going to get while the Gnarls Barkley Song was a huge hit and won best video of the year.

It is surely not the first time that more than one person tapped into the same creative wavelength serendipitously. The good news is that they are entirely different approaches to the same Rorschach concept, and they have such different sensibilities. I think their video and our film sequence both succeeded in what they were trying to achieve.

ATS: What is the most important thing you learned before this sequence? What’s the most important thing you learned while creating this sequence?

HN: 1. One of my good friends Patrick Hoelck taught me a good habit: Reducing your outcome to a single sentence. (*I think he got it from Vincent Gallo). I wrote it out for this project. (It is a run-on but it still kept me fixed on the target):

“To visually stimulate and induce the viewers subconscious by using totally authentic psychiatric devices which take them on a psychological trip that explores the inner depth of the male psyche.”

2. Hard work always adds up to something (my old acting coach used to say that all the time).

ATS: Do you have a favorite element from the piece?

HN: My favorite element is the first inkblot I got to work as a graphic. It’s probably the most rudimentary of them all but something about it speaks to me. After the film was finished, I burned a screen and ran some limited edition silkscreen prints of that inkblot at Richard Duardo’s studio…it then became part of a group show at Otero Passart Gallery. We have continued to sell them and a portion of the proceeds of all the inkblots sold goes to The Learning Disabilities Association of California.

ATS: What was the process for working with the composer Mark Mothersbaugh (Devo)?

HN: In the beginning we used the Devo song because we didn’t have anything else and we all liked it. But as we got further along in the animation process I realized if we had to change the song it would be a MAJOR setback in what was already a very challenging project. Scott Caan (Director of The Dog Problem) kept saying, “Don’t worry, we’ll get it.” And whenever I would express my concern he would yell, “W-E A-R-E-G-O-N-N-A-G-E-T-I-T DOOOODE!” He challenged me a lot on this project…BUT at the same time he forced me to play above my head (Saul Bass once said that about Otto Preminger).

So one day Scott shows up toward the very end of a six-month stretch and says, “I got some bad and some good news: The bad is that we CANNOT use the Devo song…BUT the good is that I showed it to Mark and he is going to score something really similar to your titles.”

At first it was hard for me to tell if that was good news, but in the end it worked even better than I could have imagined because the new track felt more contemporary and fitting. To me it sounds like the version of “Gut Feeling” that would play in a psychedelic dream.

ATS: Who inspires you?

HN: Tony Robbins…you think that’s a joke…seriously.
Here are some others: Elia Kazan, Herb Lubalin, Charles & Ray Eames, Busby Berkeley, Saul Bass, Pablo Ferro, Daniel Bernoulli (1700-1782), Gustave Eiffel, Guy Bourdin, William Eggleston, David Hamilton, Dawn Tarnofsky Ostroff.

ATS: Is there someone relatively new whose work excites you?

HN: I saw an installation (Mother + Father) at Sundance this year by Candice Breitz that was pretty fantastic. Todd Cole has always been one of my favorite artists. Darren Romanelli, who I would define as the modern day Nudie Cohn (Elvis Prestley’s costume designer).

ATS: Parting thoughts?

HN: There were many many people who had their hands on this other than me. But there is one person who was literally by my side for the entire duration of this creative journey. Her name is Eileen Bertumen. Simply put, I never could have pulled it off without her.

Also, look out for Scott Caan Photographs Vol.1.
This art book was a collaboration between Scott Caan, Brett Ratner, and myself. It is being released this May 2009.

Art of the Title: Tell us a little bit about how you were approached to do this sequence; what were some of the early conversations?

Jamie Caliri: I first met with the writers and producers of the show. They had a pretty clear idea of what they wanted. Dave Finkle had sketched out a loose story board that showed the camera moving through a series of paper pop-up environments. Each environment represented a different Tara personality. Over the course of sending story boards back and forth, we decided to add actual characters into the pop-ups. We would keep her face hidden until the end.

ATS: How much of a character sketch did you have for each of Tara’s alters?

JC: They showed me the first few episodes, this helped a lot.

ATS: It seems like the sequence combines real-time action as well as stop-motion action? Is this the case?

JC: The piece is stop motion from start to finish. Some shots had minimal animation and others more. We attempted to build as many actual working pop-ups as possible

ATS: How did you work with the musical element? (Did you have it beforehand?)

JC: The music came in about half way through. We started cutting and shifting things a bit, but not much. It all just worked out. I did shift the music at one point to land a big boom sound over the falling foot. I thought this was Tim’s intention. It turned out to be a happy accident.

ATS: What equipment did you use?

JC: We shot with both the Canon 40D and the Nikon D300. We used Dragon Stop Motion to capture our 3K files. We did a bit of multi pass and multi exposure shooting. We composited in After Effects.

ATS: What is the most important thing you learned while creating this sequence?

JC: That building pop-up books is an art and a science. I understand why they call those folks paper engineers.

ATS: What recent work has taken you by surprise?

JC: I loved Raf Wathion’s Electrabel spot with all of the tea lights – amazing!

“This opening scene used 500 hand-drawn illustrations and the team spent two months experimenting with the many options.”

“The first minute and a half was not in Taiyo Matsumoto’s original Manga, “Tekkon Kinkreet.” This [beginning] sets the tone…this shot [of the raven’s flight] is the first thing we actually executed. I thought we’d take the hardest shot first and figure how far we could take it and that would set the pace for the rest of the production.”

“I would send them our rushes to keep them in the loop. I haven’t heard of too many animated films where there’s been any music completed during the actual production of the film. It was one of those art school ideas of having the actual production of the music be a metaphor for something that’s happening in the story itself (the old world giving way to the new world) I was feeling like [Plaid’s music] had that in it.”

“We had to decide how to communicate [Shakespeare’s] prologue…setting the film in a modern day world, we decided to use the media.”

“The idea is to find modern images and equivalents that could decode the language of Shakespeare. What’s interesting here is that…you hear the prologue once and when we go inside the news report you’ll hear it a second time. The same speech appears twice to give the audience the chance to acclimatize their ear to the language.”

Regarding the violent footage, “Most people think it is real riot footage. Most of [the imagery] is of Mexico City shot from helicopter and staged behind the studio backlot. There is no library footage at all. We shot every frame that is in that moment.”

Regarding editing, “The constant invention and reinvention…the moving of beats…there’s a lot to be said about that opening overture. That was something totally constructed and driven by Jill [film editor Jill Bilcock]. For our way of working it is an endless ongoing process of building, testing, criticizing and improving.”

“We had many versions of the start of the film. There was a time where we didn’t trust the text…we were making a lot of excuses and felt enormous pressure that the audience simply wouldn’t understand the heightened world we had created. We finally realized that if you create a world where things were made clear [then] Shakespeare’s language would tell the story.”

Director Shane Meadows, “When the actor’s names come up we decided to put these rolling numbers; the whole font idea was meant to be…like a British soldier’s dog tag. So those numbers rolling ‘round are meant to echo the numbers of soldier’s dog tags who’ve died because…[SPOILER] the lead character’s father has passed away [in the Falklands Conflict].”

Producer Mark Herbert, “One of the things about this archive [opening sequence]…[were] the amount of tapes you had to sift through in the edit.”

Meadows, “It was a joy to be honest, looking at this footage from the 80’s…some of it was local news…a range of things of the time…like this…you don’t see people on the streets anymore whereas back in the 80’s, everyone, it seemed, from women to miners to the riots in Birmingham, everyone seemed to be out saying what they thought.”

Studio Daily’s in depth interview with title sequence director Michelle Dougherty

“Gripping imagery consisting of…chiariscuro in the style of Goya. [Director of Photography Gabriel] Figueroa…would use color to create, from the early images of Firmin’s [played by Albert Finney] nocturnal wanderings, an allegorical universe that mixes death (sugar-candy skulls and banes, laughing masks) and celebration (garish lanterns, garlands)…a night peopled by wild illusions…suffocating qualities…[the] poetic frenzy of an alcoholic.”