, by Meleah Maynard | Production
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In a broad sense, the history viewers see unfolding in WGN America’s World War II-era drama, Manhattan, is true. In the early 1940s, as word spread that German physicists had successfully split uranium, physicists, chemists and other experts from around the world did converge on Los Alamos, New Mexico, to research and develop the first atomic bomb. They kept their mission secret: even from their families whom they brought along with them to live in the remote desert location.
Against this backdrop, Manhattan explores the consequences of all that secrecy through characters and plotlines that are mostly fictional. And the inherent strain and conflict of the situation is evident from the main title sequence (above), which was designed by Imaginary Forces. Relying primarily on Cinema 4D and After Effects, the creative studio and production house created schematic imagery that juxtaposes elements of domestic life with the scientists’ work in the lab. A recipe becomes a formula. Instructions for setting the table transform into a how-to for putting on a gas mask. And dance steps evolve into a chain reaction.
“We started with the idea of how they built the town in Los Alamos from nothing and how that was similar to the building of the bomb,” recalls Imaginary Forces Art Director Jeremy Cox. “So starting with schematics of the town and the bomb, we moved on to this kind of crazy mashup of aesthetics that evoked home life and the technical achievements going on in Los Alamos.”
Concepting
Imaginary Forces originally passed on an offer to pitch ideas for the show’s title sequence because they were too busy with other projects. But a year later Manhattan creator, Sam Shaw, contacted them again. He hadn’t yet found the look he wanted, and he wondered if they could take a crack at it? “We said yes,” Cox says, explaining that initial conversations included briefs about themes and looking at the pilot and some footage to get sense of the tone of the show.
“But they were very wide open conceptually, and they didn’t tell us what they liked and didn’t like about what they’d seen so far,” he continues. “They just wanted us to see what we could come up with.” So with the themes of secrecy, science and what it must have been like to live in the first planned community in mind, the Imaginary Forces team came up with four initial concepts. Shaw immediately gravitated toward the one they ended up going with. “They were enthusiastic from the start about the graphic rendering of the story, the authenticity of the time and the way we juxtaposed things in a way that was tongue in cheek but also ominous,” explains producer Jon Hassell.
A Diagrammatic Approach
Cox credits designer Griffin Frazen for coming up with the minimal yet sophisticated visual style of the titles, which the team describes as diagrammatic. Ideas for the imagery were largely gleaned from research on everything from the building of the remote town the scientists and their families lived in to declassified government documents about the US nuclear program in the 1940s and ‘50s.
Some elements were drawn by hand, but most were taken from historic documents, which helped create the sense of authenticity. “Sam did a lot of research on his own and was always sharing it with us,” says Cox. “It was really important to him that we remained accurate, even to the smaller details.”
After showing how the various blueprint-like papers and plans they were creating could be animated in After Effects and Cinema 4D for use as a transitional device, the team got approval on the pitch and had six weeks to deliver. Early motion tests helped determine how the visual sequences would go together.
Telling the Story
While Cox and his team were clear on most of their approach to the titles, he couldn’t quite envision how it was going to look to have little characters moving around in scenes at the beginning and end of the sequence. But they went ahead and set up a shoot on the ground outside the building where Imaginary Forces is located anyway. Using a Canon 7D, they shot footage of staff members walking this way and that on white paper spread out on the sidewalk five floors below.
“I wasn’t sure how it was going to turn out, but it was fun leaning out the window and shooting everyone walking around,” says Cox, who liked how the characters looked once the staffers were rotoscoped out and placed into various scenes. They used the same technique for the ending where what begins as black dots turns into people being drawn into the Manhattan Project. “We didn’t shoot that many people, so finding a way to compose all of them in a way that looked organic took some work, but we figured it out,” he says.
Cox used C4D’s Sketch & Toon to give the buildings and some of the other diagrammatic elements a more hand-drawn look. After creating the expansive town, which was modeled after photographs of Los Alamos, he did several still renders from various distances with decreasing levels of detail. “As we move out you see these concentric rings around the town that represent iconic images that many of us have seen of an atomic blast radius,” he explains.
Next, that haunting atomic-era image becomes a frying pan into which eggs are being cracked by an unseen woman’s hands. As the yolk splits—a metaphor for the splitting of an atom—we see that she is following a recipe for apple butter pie. Steps in the recipe are crossed out as she goes: the same way parts of formulas are being redacted in the secret documents that follow.
On and on go the juxtapositions of domestic and scientific life, interrupted only slightly by transitions involving the shuffling or falling of paper. While those scenes were lit, animated and rendered in Cinema 4D, the content on the papers was added in After Effects. “We knew we would need to be changing the content on the papers, so this way we didn’t have to re-render everything every time,” Cox says. Editing was done in Final Cut Pro.
Feedback on the titles has been positive, and Cox and the rest of the Imaginary Forces team appreciated having the opportunity to collaborate creatively with Shaw. “There was something really refreshing about this job,” he says. “It was a chance to do a graphic take on a subject, which is different from a lot of the render intensive projects we’ve been doing lately. There was a purity about it and we enjoyed that.”
Credits:
Designed and Produced by Imaginary Forces
Director: Dan Gregoras
Art Director: Jeremy Cox
Executive Producer: Gabriel Marquez
Producer: Jon Hassell
Designer: Griffin Frazen
Animator: Sekani Solomon
Cel Animation: Peter Ahern
Editor: Karl Amdal
Additional Designs: Audrey Davis, Tim Haldeen
Meleah Maynard is a Minneapolis-based writer and editor.
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