Television's best opening credits achieve a nearly impossible task: In the span of 90 seconds they explain both everything and nothing to the viewer. It’s all about balance---evoking, not explaining; hinting, not revealing. “It’s really about world building,” Patrick Clair says.
Clair is the creative director of Elastic, the Los Angeles production design studio that won an Emmy for True Detective’s first-season title sequence. And if you recall, the world Clair and his team built for showrunner Nic Pizzolatto last season was one of grime and despair. It was as if the designers took a bunch of photos from Louisiana's landscape and tapped a filter named “depressing.”
True Detective made its second-season debut last night, and its opening title sequence is as predictably bleak---and as beautifully rendered---as the first. But where the inaugural season was all about '90s Louisiana's water-stained yellows, swampy blues, and hazy industrial grays, this time around, the colors are high-contrast blacks and whites, and bright reds and oceanic teals to evoke modern-day California's frenzied, more sinister vibe. “They have completely different feels, different palettes, different textures,” Clair explains. That’s because they’re completely different stories.
True Detective has always used landscape as a metaphor for the messy inner turmoil of its characters' lives. While writing season one, Pizzolatto came across Richard Misrach’s Petrochemical America, a book of haunting photographs documenting the industrial-ravaged landscape of the south. In the show, the poisoned land reflected the poisoned nature of the characters. Clair drew on this idea in the opening sequence, constructing surreal double-exposure shots that layer stills from the show with Misrach's image of the Louisiana landscape.
You see this same idea echoed in season two’s sequence, but this time Clair used David Maisel’s stunning aerial photographs of iconic California scenery (with a few Jake Sargeant shots as well) to build his collages. Clair and his team placed these photos on top of slowed-down footage from the show to create what he describes as “living photographs.” The result is an opening sequence that seems to reside somewhere between still images and video footage. “It’s really about trying to make it feel like you’re journeying through a photograph,” he explains. “You don’t want it to be as crazy and intense as watching footage, because footage is about a series of events happening, whereas this is just about the compositions themselves.”
This surreal form of motion produces the effect of being in a dream, while the ambiguity of the images---a lifeguard station set against wildly flowing hair, a freeway running through a silhouette of a face, black-and-white footage of a solar flare---give a brooding sense of what’s to come without revealing too much. As Clair explains it, the best opening sequences tend to be a hyper-intense visual distillation of the ideas and emotions. It has to pack into a minute and a half what a narrative might take multiple episodes to communicate. “The story of these characters' lives are more detailed and messier and chaotic,” he says of season two. “They’re really lives that are falling apart, and that’s what we tried to capture with the visuals here.”
