How Patrick Clair won the Emmy for 90 seconds of True Detective

For Clair, the title sequences that have stood the test of time have a simple but meaningful idea at their core; a man in freefall, a dead body being prepared for burial, the brutality of cooking breakfast.

Even the most casual of TV viewers will have little difficulty recognising the shows to which Clair is referring, for in many ways, the eye-catching and memorable title sequences of Mad Men, Six Feet Under and Dexter are emblematic of a creative resurgence in design that has blossomed on TV screens in the past few years.

The idea that functional "title cards" could be transformed into a two or three-minute sequence of art originates in 1950s cinema when Saul Bass created dynamic, eye-candy sequences for directors such as Alfred Hitchcock and Otto Preminger. Later would come Maurice Binder with his outrageously colourful, inventive and risque sequences for James Bond films and Barbarella.

Though there were a few notable exceptions, for example the psychedelic and still-evolving Doctor Who credits, it was not until the late 1990s that producers and broadcasters began to rethink title design in TV.

In part it was driven by technology and the ready access designers had to digital tools, as well as the notice that designer Kyle Cooper had attracted for the hair-raising sequence for the movie Se7en, most of which was shot on Super-8 in a cupboard.

But it was also a product of the sophistication and cinematic sensibility that emerging cable companies, notably HBO, wanted to bring to shows such as The Sopranos and Six Feet Under. Soon, others followed.

The revived interest in title sequences prompted graphic designer Ian Albinson to launch a dedicated website, Art of the Title, seven years ago.

"We wanted to elevate it to an art form, which I think it is, but there was so little you could find out about title sequences," Albinson says.

"As a designer I wanted to talk to other designers and creative professionals and find out what makes them tick and do the work they do."

He also discovered that title design is a unique, multi-disciplinary job that happens at arm's length from the show's creators.

"The easiest thing is a technical ability because that's easily learned and now the technology to produce for film or TV is available to everyone. But that's not going to take you very far if you don't have skills in storytelling, graphic design, typography. Those are the main things that every sequence uses. Some are graphic designed, some are illustrated, some are live-action, there's a wide range of style and mediums being used, but the key thing is to have a vision and be able to articulate what you want to see and come up with those concepts."

Patrick Clair, who is now 32, became interested in design as a film student in Brisbane. He did a two-year masters at the Australian Film, Television and Radio School specialising in title design, then cut his teeth doing the graphics work on ABC shows Hungry Beast and The Chaser.

His company, Antibody, created the eerie, haunting and arresting sequence for True Detective from a warehouse in Sydney. On Monday, it took out the Emmy Award for  outstanding main title design.

Armed with detailed notes from the director and writer of the intense psychological drama, Clair's starting point was the "petrochemical landscape of Louisiana", which he saw as a potent metaphor for the broken, exploited, poisoned and polluted central characters, played by Woody Harrelson and Matthew McConaughey. "We like double exposure photography but what was at the core of it was could we take oil refineries and swamps and reconfigure those into these divided portraits of these men who are going through personal apocalypses, their lives falling apart, in the midst of this horrible bleak psycho-sexual, religion and death imagery?"

The level of detail in the 90-second sequence is breathtaking – in one shot, the spiked heels of a stripper and the skin of her backside were built in 3D. But  Clair points to the 11-second sequence for Silicon Valley, another Emmy contender, to stress that a title sequence does not have to be long to have an effect. "Abstract visual design and symbolism is a powerful way to bring people into your world and to introduce them to your characters. We live in a very visual culture, people are used to seeing typography and layout and pictures to tell stories and I think that's one of the reasons why still images, typography and animation are becoming a more important part of how film and TV communicates."

Clair cites Homeland as an example of a credit sequence that gives the audience an insight into the thematic subtext of a show.

There we see a small child lost inside a maze while dreamlike images of recent world events flicker and jump as if slipping through a film projector.

"You think it's about intelligence values and world events and what you realise as the series unfolds is it's essentially a tragic story about the hardship of existing in the world with a mental illness and the challenges of trying to be a functional professional and family member when you can't trust your own judgment."

The resume of Los Angeles-based Imaginary Forces includes some of the seminal title work of the past two decades: Mad Men, Boardwalk Empire, The Pacific, South Park and Black Sails, which was also up for this year's Emmy, among others.

It was co-founded by Se7en title designer Kyle Cooper, Chip Houghton and Peter Frankfurt, whose father Stephen created the main titles for the 1962 classic To Kill A Mockingbird.

When the company started in 1996, feature films drove title-sequence work, but the money and effort these days goes into series made by premium cable channels such as HBO, Starz and Netflix, Houghton says.

"These shows live longer than a box-office weekend-rider, and it allows us the opportunity to play it out a lot longer because people revisit it and reconnect with the show in ways that you don't do with features any more."

Title sequences, he says, are a ritualistic part of the TV-viewing experience, akin to the raising of the curtain at the theatre.

"The purpose is to set the tone, the mood, get you ready for it. The filmmaker is creating the experience, drawing the audience in."

While every pitch is different, typically several concepts will be presented to the makers of a show in the design phase.

In the case of Mad Men, the show's creator, Matthew Weiner, presented the designers with a two-page brief that discussed not only the show, but the era, the internal and external conflicts that are going and what he was looking for and not looking for.

The sequence, reminiscent of the sleek modernism of acclaimed graphic designer Saul Bass, shows an abstracted figure falling through a canyon of skyscrapers plastered with advertising images. It has since become one of the most recognised and talked-about sequences in recent times, but it was only one of several creative approaches, says Houghton.

However, the end-frame of Don Draper's arm stretched out on the back of a couch was there from the outset. "Matthew [Weiner] pointed to that and said 'that's it, that's it right there'," recalls Houghton.

He says that earlier iterations had far more detail and the falling figure had a lot more motion, "which didn't work because it was too real looking".

Imaginary Forces designer Michelle Dougherty says that Boardwalk Empire's title sequence, where Steve Buscemi's crooked mayor "Nucky" watches grog bottles being washed up on the shoreline, "talks to where we were at" at the time she worked with Cooper on Se7en.

"It is a live-action action sequence but we're taking a designer's eye and seeing what we can create. It has computer-generated elements but it's mostly live action. We went through ideas, and they ultimately picked this one where the main character is in control. We showed that control by creating this multitude of bottles that he's controlling as they wash into shore now that he's the king of the boardwalk".

Houghton adds: "What's interesting, if it's Se7en, Mad Men, Boardwalk Empire, in each one of those we had to get in the head of the main protagonist, or in Se7en inside the crazy man's head. In Don Draper's world everything is perfect but also falling apart. Same thing with Boardwalk Empire where he's in control but a storm surge is arriving. It's always a question of how do you get inside their head and express that in an interesting way?

Houghton cautions that the field has become highly competitive to the point where it's fast becoming unfeasible to prepare a pitch for a job that as many as 10 other companies will contest. "Honestly, we're our own worst enemies in terms of a business model. There was a resurgence of titles and we were all young and hungry for the business and it quickly went from us getting paid $25,000 to us spending $25,000."

The field is flourishing in other ways, says Houghton. "We do a lot of work for video-game studios now, so all of a sudden there's a market there. It used to be we had the TV and movie screen. Now there's thousands of types of screens. I think we're always going to see beautiful design on whatever screen we use. We're asked to introduce someone to a story, create a mood, explain some back story and that's something that always needs to be done. What it looks like, whether it's at the beginning or end or middle of the content, that will change, but we're always going to be in need of beautiful and great-thinking design and be able to express ideas quickly to people so they can engage. It's going to blow up in terms of opportunity."

Clair is similarly optimistic about motion design, having  moved from Sydney to Los Angeles, where his work now includes video games, "huge international franchises" and, now, the fillip of an Emmy Award.

He says that when he won the "prestige brief for motion designers" on the MTV Music Video Awards, it wasn't his work on True Detective they wanted to talk about but his work on Hungry Beast. "I keep saying, if it wasn't for the work we did on ABC we wouldn't be here now".

TEN OF THE BEST

True Detective

LA-based Australian Patrick Clair won the 2014 Emmy for the haunting title sequence of HBO's brilliant drama. The 90-second sequence is visually arresting and complex, featuring double exposures, dissolves, industrial landscapes and superimposed, manipulated shots of the faces of Woody Harrelson and Matthew McConaughey, who play the burned-out Louisiana detectives making one last and desperate bid for salvation.

 

American Horror Story

Eek. Kyle Cooper's (Se7en) 60-second sequence taps into a collective nightmare of subliminal horror. It's violent, confronting, unsettling and raw, and leaves viewers in no doubt of what lies ahead.

 

Breaking Bad

An example of a sequence where simplicity and thematic relevance is rolled into one. In 18 seconds, the elementary table and the smoke of a meth lab render the letters of the title. A short and sharp entree to the thrilling and nervous world of Walter White.

 

Dexter

As we watch the eponymous Dexter (Michael C. Hall) undertake his morning ablutions, we are treated to seemingly disparate images: a razor blade slicing through Dexter's stubble; a cooking knife dissecting raw meat; an egg splattering on a frypan; blood dripping into a basin; a mosquito obliterated mid-meal... The effect is visceral and queasy, macabre and hilarious, repellent yet alluring, much like the dark hero of the piece.

 

Elementary 

Network dramas are notable for their absence in the title sequence category of the Emmy awards, but this was a notable departure. A Rube Goldberg contraption is deployed to illustrate the unorthodox yet rigorously logical, cause-and-effect working of Sherlock Holmes' over-stimulated brain.

 

Game of Thrones

Oscar-winning Australian editor Angus Wall created the attention-grabbing title sequences of Carnivale, Rome and Big Love before this striking Emmy-winner, which uses maps, Leonardo's machines and exquisitely rendered models of medieval cities to create the fantasy world of Westeros.

 

Mad Men

For a show that pulses to the mood of Madison Avenue circa 1960, it's fitting that Mad Men's Emmy-winning credit sequence would be reminiscent of Saul Bass's remarkable work on films such as Hitchcock's North By Northwest andVertigo. The sequence shows the black-and-white silhouette of a businessman arriving at his office, which then implodes, dispatching him through a canyon of skyscrapers lined with advertising images.

 

Six Feet Under

By now we all know how Alan Ball's show ended – a teary six-minute flash-forward foretelling the deaths of the extended Fisher family. Yet from its first moments back in 2001, Danny Yount's Emmy-winning title sequence provided a roadmap of that finale. Yount says he initially pictured a day in the life of a mortician after hearing Thomas Newman's lyrical score.

 

The Sopranos

This sequence might not rate as the most inventive, but it marked a new departure for TV. Tony Soprano's journey from Manhattan to his home in New Jersey references everyday urban locales, the ordinariness of which is a brutal counterpoint to the messy deeds that unfold in the mob drama.

 

True Blood

This sequences begins and ends in a primeval swamp, quite literally; in between comes a feast of icky imagery featuring outcasts of the human and animal races; hungry reptiles, hooded klansmen, good ol' boys, religious zealouts. It's one-part Dracula, one-part southern gothic. (Footage courtesy of Foxtel- Showcase)

 

Title sequences can be viewed at artofthetitle.com.