One side effect of the proliferation of digital effects is the extinguishing of most live flames on film and television sets. It’s safer, cheaper, and more easily manipulated for post-production purposes. Perhaps that’s why it’s so arresting to watch the team of creative behind the title sequence of Apple TV’s Smoke ignore all of that.
The Emmy nominees who brought the Smoke credits to life — including director Mason Nicoll, designer Ana Criado, art director and cinematographer Rachel Brickel, art director Peter Pak, animator Simon Chan, and editor Justin West — spoke with Gold Derby about how a sequence like this comes together and what good can come from playing with fire.
As Nicoll explained, the team had a lot of freedom when it came to conceiving the titles for the series, which tells the story of a hunt for arsonists. After fielding a few pitches for what the sequence would look like, it was ultimately Criado’s concept that won the day.
“We are hanging on this idea of the point of origin, so while we are setting everything on fire, we are actually de-firing the stuff, finding where was the origin,” Criado said. “And it makes sense to make it analogue, not CGI, because we wanted to see how the materials behave with the fire.”
The job of discovering “how the material behave with the fire” fell largely to Brickel. “There was a lot of experimentation on every shot, and from the get-go, we were trying to do something different,” Brickel said. “It wasn’t really about the fire. It was about trying to figure out how things transform and how they change. And figuring out the art of an object and using the fire as a paintbrush and figuring out what’s the best way to burn these items. And we found out the coolest way to burn them is above 2,000 degrees.”
And scoring all of that fiery experiment was “Dialing In,” a previously unreleased song by Radiohead frontman Thom Yorke. The singer had a previously relationship with series creator Dennis Lehane, so the track was actually the first piece of the credits puzzle place onto the table. “Usually we come in, sometimes there’s ideas of a song, but really rarely is it like “OK, here’s a track that we’ve been thinking about for a while,” Nicoll said.
This article and video are presented by Apple TV.
