Antenna Creative | Leave The World Behind

After screening an early version of the film, which already had the exact placement, timings, and music for the sequence in place (courtesy of editor Lisa Lassek), director Sam Esmail gave us a brief that left us excited, focused, and just the right amount of anxious – in other words, inspired! Essentially, much like the music track (THE REV3NGE, by Joey Bada$$), the titles needed to be bold, aggressive, and a little bit punk, promising the audience that what lay in store for them would be… well, the end-times.

With a film that is heavily influenced by the work of Alfred Hitchcock and, in some cases, pays direct homage to scenes and shots from films such as North By Northwest, Psycho, and Strangers on a Train, you can’t be surprised when the director mentions Saul Bass’ work. That said, as a designer, you usually need to be careful when directly referencing Bass’ work, lest it devolve into full-on plagiarism. However, this film, more than any other we’ve worked on, gave us permission to explore and touch upon Bass’ work in the same way the film touches upon Hitchcock’s.

A sequence of individual shots cut to the beat of the music consisting of the silhouettes of objects in 3D space aligned in arrays and grids forming patterns. As the camera orbits around them, hinting at the cyber-attack central to the film, the objects cut in and out of low-resolution versions of themselves – if a square pixel is the building block of a 2D bitmap image, then the 3D equivalent would be a cube. These cube objects are abstract, obscure, and sometimes misguide their true identity. The color effects are a visual representation of the disorienting noise that occurs in the film, predominantly blue.

All the while, we worked on the Main Title Card typography, design, and animation. An entirely separate evolution happening in parallel to the rest of the sequence, that would eventually be incorporated into the final.