The Art of the Title Sequence Film Graphics in Motion Book

The All-time Title Sequences of 2020

Information technology's been a year like no other. A year when and then many of us turned to screens to connect or, indeed, to disconnect; when nosotros ached for a dollop of entertainment, a moment of escape or a dose of comfort, for something familiar or something completely new.

This year, for Art of the Title's seventh almanac list of the yr'southward top x title sequences, we're doing something new. We reached out to our community to pull in new voices and to aggrandize the squad that calls the shots for the Peak 10 Championship Sequences of the Year.

Chosen by Fine art of the Championship'south panel of experts

The 2022 console includes: Yussef Cole, motion graphic designer and writer; Manija Emran, creative director and co-founder, Me & The Bootmaker; Frank William Miller, Jr., blueprint director, Affair Unlimited; Robin Nishio, director and graphic artist; Louise Sandhaus, graphic designer, educator and author; plus Art of the Title's founder Ian Albinson and Editor-in-Main Lola Landekic.

The panel chose this year's top titles from among flick, television, video games, web series, events and conferences. These championship sequences were painstakingly animated, painted, composited, illustrated, torn and pasted, shot, performed and typeset by teams large and small all around the earth, navigating a global pandemic, with budgets pocket-size and mighty, over video calls, in country-of-the-art facilities and in home studios. So sit down dorsum, relax, and enjoy some of the most interesting and innovative work to hit screens this year.

Fine art of the Title'due south Pinnacle ten Title Sequences of 2020

10. Between the World and Me

CATEGORY: Boob tube Movie
Created by Elastic

Brisk and chock with energy. So begins Between the Globe and Me, the HBO special based on the adaptation and staging of Ta-Nehisi Coates'south non-fiction volume of the same proper noun.

Produced past artistic director Hazel Baird, art manager Diego Coutinho and a team at studio Elastic, the special's opening titles set up Coates's experiences growing up in inner-metropolis Baltimore and explore issues surrounding Black life in the United States. Coutinho drew inspiration from Coates's books (the cover fine art for Between the World and Me makes an appearance forth with work by painter Calida Garcia Rawles, who created the artwork for his 2022 novel The Water Dancer), as well every bit the texture of paper, layered and torn, and the watercolours of Molly Crabapple, whose illustrations appear in the film proper. Director Kamilah Forbes urged an interplay between scenes of suffering and scenes of affection, beauty, and art, as well as the inclusion of more books. Look closely and spot Toni Morrison's Vocal of Solomon, Richard Wright's Native Son and Frantz Fanon'south The Wretched of the Earth. Prepare to the rousing second verse of Black Thought & Salaam Remi's "Soundtrack to Defoliation," the titles are a bustling collage of documentary and archival footage, paste-upwardly and stop-motion, and excerpts from Coates'due south work. The resultant sequence is an exuberant march through fourth dimension and space, a scrapbook pulsing with pain and pride.

9. The Invisible Human

CATEGORY: Pic
Created by Greenhaus GFX

For the opening of 2020's The Invisible Human being, director and screenwriter Leigh Wannell'south retelling of the 1897 novel by H.G. Wells, studio Greenhaus GFX created a simple, spine-tingling title reveal. What'southward remarkable here is what's missing. From the first moments of the film, when the massive messages of "Universal" rotate around the world amid silence and an ominous rumbling, it's all systems keep atmosphere. At the bottom of a cliff, in the half-low-cal of evening, waves crash against rock, revealing the opening production credits, only visible thanks to the splash of the tide.

To create the sequence, Greenhaus worked with a crew from Beverly Hills Aerials to capture drone footage off the declension of Palos Verdes, Los Angeles, chosen to lucifer the look of the film's shooting location in Australia. Information technology'south the "best modern re-imagining of the low budget horror movie title," says panel judge Robin Nishio. "It sets up the opening act well and, on second viewing, captures the gaslighting horror that is the rest of the picture." The eerie opening both foreshadows the motion picture's climactic boxing in which water and liquids play a vital part and nods at a key tenet of horror storytelling: what is monstrous tin be vanquished only one time it's revealed.

8. My Psychedelic Love Story

CATEGORY: Film
Created by Jeremy Landman with Brian Practice, David Practice, and Steven Do

"Montage ecstasy," says panel judge Louise Sandhaus, describing the opening to Errol Morris's 2022 documentary My Psychedelic Dearest Story, centered on the acid-fueled love affair between Joanna Harcourt-Smith and Timothy Leary, the and so-called high priest of LSD.

Graphic designer Jeremy Landman and a team of animators use bold colour with a potpourri of effects, blazon treatments and shapes, layering mystical imagery, archival photographs and cut-out headlines to requite the sequence the vibe of a playful trip; a headlong dive down the rabbithole. The credits are gear up in a adumbral typeface and placed atop blazing color contrasts, all stewed together to create a hodgepodge of vivid psychedelia. This treatment as well populates the film proper, resulting in an experience of boundless surprises and graphic delights.

7. Defending Jacob

CATEGORY: TV
Created by yU+co

In Apple TV+'s eight-episode thriller Defending Jacob, Hollywood'due south stalwart Helm America Chris Evans heads to court, playing a lawyer whose teenaged son is accused of murder. Similar the miniseries itself, a mood piece every bit much as information technology is a nuts-and-bolts crime drama, the title sequence moves slowly and somberly to unspool a story with aplenty clever turns. Created by studio yU+co (Mrs. America, Crazy Rich Asians) the opening is a window into a family torn apart, the contemplative score by Atli Örvarsson walking a knife'southward border of ticking tension and pressurized grace.

"I'm a sucker for transitions," says panel gauge Robin Nishio and indeed, there's something so satisfying about seeing one epitome turn seamlessly into another, their creases and edges lined upward merely so. What are the rules and where are the boundaries? Where does one moment finish and some other begin?

6. Piffling America

CATEGORY: Television
Created by Teddy Blanks, CHIPS

Little America, one of this year's many offerings from Apple Tv+, showcases 8 intimate portraits of the immigrant experience in the United States spread across the 70s, 80s, and 90s. The large-hearted album series is written and executive produced by Lee Eisenberg (The Role), who serves as showrunner along with Sian Heder, and developed by writing duo Kumail Nanjiani and Emily V. Gordon (The Big Sick), too executive producers on the series.

Each episode opens with classic visions of small-town Americana. For the titles, designer Teddy Blanks places the names of the coiffure and cast (largely as-even so-unknown actors) into vintage scenes: highway billboards, store signage, the side of a railroad vehicle, a gas station A-frame, integrating each proper noun into the scenery like it was there all forth. The names and the signs alter with each instalment and are paired with episode-specific music, often a cover of an American hitting. Episode ii features a encompass of Lauryn Hill's "Doo Wop (That Thing)" by Quantic and Anita Tijoux, while episode six features "Bang Bang (My Infant Shot Me Downwardly)" written by Sonny Bono sung in Mandarin by Hong Kong actress Betty Chung. Birthday the effect is that of a much-loved photo anthology, an insistence that all of the people who live in a nation course its whole.

five. The Skillful Lord Bird

CATEGORY: Television receiver
Created past King and Country, LLC

The good book, a blackbird, a spiralled dominicus, a bloodied plumage, and a leaping figure, transforming into an onion to avoid the slings and arrows of the day. These are some of the images, expressed in black and blue, brick red and butter yellow, in a stark woodcut style, that form the opening sequence of The Skilful Lord Bird, Ethan Hawke's spitfire series for Offset.

Based on the novel of the aforementioned name by James McBride, the bear witness follows Henry Shackleford (Joshua Caleb Johnson), an enslaved boy, and John Browne (Hawke), an abolitionist, every bit they travel together with Browne's "gunfighters of the gospel" in the years only before the American Civil State of war. The animation was created by studio Male monarch and Land and features the uplifting hymn "Come up on Children, Let'south Sing" by gospel vocalist and civil rights activist Mahalia Jackson. Spurred frontwards by Jackson's invigorating contralto, the titles paint a picture of savage and bare land, spare living, and historical myth. Jackson once said, "I sing God's music because it makes me feel complimentary." An apt choice for a series with emancipation in its heart.

4. Feels Adept Human

CATEGORY: Film
Created by Arthur Jones, Jenna Caravello, Nicole Stafford, Khylin Woodrow

Artist Matt Furie grew upward drawing cartoons, particularly frogs with prominent, anthropoid faces. In 2005, he published Boy's Society, a comic featuring a cast of gangly goof-offs, among them a frog named Pepe who became a messageboard in-joke and then an Net sensation. Spreading like wildfire from Myspace to Tumblr to 4Chan, Pepe became a symbol of hate used by various far-right and white supremacist groups in the mid-2010s.

Fast forward to 2020. Managing director Arthur Jones' doc Feels Proficient Man tells the story of the amphibian's cribbing, its furnishings on Furie and our current meme-infused culture. Spectacular segments of animation by Jones, Jenna Caravello, Nicole Stafford, and Khylin Woodrow bring Pepe to life. Beginning with the opening titles, the animation gives the film a leap-start and establishes a visual language that moors the picture in a bright and baroque reality. The opener features bold championship type, rich colour, and, in the words of panel judge Louise Sandhaus, "a whiz-blindside crescendo." The film is capped off in style, too, with a closing animation to match: Pepe dives away in a totally zen sunset transport-off. Ultimately, the titles are a wonderfully accessible, inviting and joyful introduction to a far-reaching and powerful cartoon phenomenon.

3. Playgrounds Festival 2020

CATEGORY: Conference
Created by The Panics

"If at that place's one thing that'due south come out of this pandemic information technology's aesthetics that make use of this gridded platform known every bit Zoom. That's what these titles do – for the most role – to peachy fun and effect," says console judge Louise Sandhaus. "If you've got limitations, exploit them."

This year conferences and festivals the earth over were tested for their resourcefulness. Events were cancelled, postponed or transformed altogether. In the case of Playgrounds, a set of conference-way events taking identify bi-annually in Eindhoven, Berlin and Amsterdam, the events moved entirely online. Tasked with creating the festival's opening video, managing director Erwin van den IJssel and the team at Amsterdam-based studio The Panics decided to follow suit. Using a combination of this year's video-conversation software of choice, Zoom, paired with the time-honoured technique of stop-move, each member of the 22-person team contributed to the titles from the comfort of their own homes.

With 962 printed pages, 3848 edges cut, eight ink cartridges used, and 3 papercuts suffered, the projection is a delightful, feel-good example of playfulness and ingenuity at their all-time.

2. Lovecraft Land

CATEGORY: TV
Created by Antibody

The latest adaptation of Lovecraftian lore is HBO'south aptly named series Lovecraft Country created by Misha Green and based on the 2022 book of the same name by Matt Ruff. Lending itself easily to Television set, the drove of interrelated stories weaves together such supernatural horrors equally monsters, malevolent spirits and magic with the real-life horrors of racism, brutality and state of war. While set in 1950s Jim Crow-era America, the series bears a sharp relevance to today, highlighting how picayune has changed and issuing a disquisitional counterblast at H.P. Lovecraft himself, a notorious racist.

The show'due south openings – vibrant 11-second hints of the eldritch terrors to come up – were created past studio Antibody. Each episode bears a dissimilar illustration by Australian creative person Ken Taylor depicting an evil strength that lingers beneath the sparse veil of civilization: a terribly toothy mouth, a decaying skull, a home with roots deep undercover, combined with an episode title and a symbol or phrase in white. The tenth and concluding opening brings these elements "full circle" in a stunning cornucopia of teeth, butterflies, roots, celestial bodies, tentacles and creeping creatures. Released in a twelvemonth that saw weeks of protestation and unrest in response to law brutality and racial injustice beyond the U.S., the show is non only a solid slice of amusement merely an intriguing work of cultural commentary. The titles continue it short and strong, a recognition of where the limelight belongs.

1. Raised past Wolves

CATEGORY: Television receiver
Created by Studio AKA

In the 22nd century, on an alien earth far from their war-ravaged domicile, two atheistic androids and their clutch of human children try to eke out an existence in a mysterious mural. Drawn into their orbit is a ship carrying members of a religious order, the Mithraic Church building, who seek to start a new, belief-driven civilization.

Anchoring this ballsy new sci-fi serial from HBO is an elegiac opener created by director Steve Small of Studio AKA and a squad of artists using a combination of 3D, rotoscope and mitt-drawn artwork. Looking at the blithe logo of his production company Scott Free, it seems clear that Alien director Ridley Scott is a fan of nighttime, painterly aesthetics. And so it'south no big surprise that Raised by Wolves, created by screenwriter Aaron Guzikowski and with Scott on board as executive producer (and director of the starting time two episodes), uses a similar look for its titles.

Full of grief, longing, and death, the title sequence provides the emotional underpinnings of the series while serving up backstory and a reminder that the characters are refugees fleeing devastation. Much of the emotion is conveyed through the beautifully haunting chief title theme by composer Ben Frost and featuring vocals by musician and voice creative person Mariam Wallentin. In her vox and in the bursts of starshine that pierce the murky darkness, at that place's tenderness and light, besides. "Pulling you from the ground, just like love will do," she says, her words conveying sorrow and hope, ashes and topsoil, and the question: What will come of this dark harvest?

Honourable Mentions

We would like to make special mention of the end titles by Saskia Marka for the The Queen's Gambit, which became Netflix'south near-watched limited scripted series to date. Featuring animations created via coding language Processing, its stark blackness-and-white imagery harkens back to early cinema and the first abstract animations – the beginnings of what we remember of today as motility graphics.

Second honourable mention goes to the titles of Russian series The Last Minister, a comedic lead-in to a show about a hapless bureaucrat roped into running a long-neglected state agency staffed with bunglers and backslappers. The sequence is Mad Men-meets-The Young Pope, a side-scroller that places credits in-situ, floating in the midground amid priceless vignettes establishing the key players. браво!

Too receiving a special mention is the stand up-out opening sequence for Accident the Human being Downward, the confident debut feature from directors Bridget Savage Cole and Danielle Krudy, which sets itself autonomously with a shanty for the ages. In beautifully captured images of coastal Maine by cinematographer Todd Banhazl, a grouping of weathered fishermen sing of life past the sea. The lone mariner puffing on a vape is a satisfying, modernistic touch on.

...and that's a wrap!

In that location are so many astonishing title sequences we weren't able to include in this tiptop 10, just many of the yr's about notable sequences are available in our 2022 titles list.

Love our choices? Disagree with our picks? Did your favourite championship sequence non make the cut? Join us on Twitter at @ArtoftheTitle and have your say.

Thanks for joining united states for another incredible year in title design. Here's to an exciting new decade!

—Lola Landekic
Editor-in-Chief, Fine art of the Title

IMAGE: Panel of judges — The Art of the Title 2022 judging panel, clockwise from top-left: Yussef Cole, Manija Emran, Frank William Miller, Jr., Robin Nishio, Louise Sandhaus; plus Fine art of the Title Editor-in-Chief Lola Landekic and Founder Ian Albinson

View the credits for this sequence

Between the Earth and Me
Studio: Elastic
Creative Manager: Hazel Baird
Art Director: Diego Coutinho
Designer: Diego Coutinho
Animators: Diego Coutinho, Rafael Morinaga.
Producer: Michael Ross
Coordinator: Mitchell Fraser
Executive Producer: Luke Colson
Deputy Head of Production: Zach Wakefield
Caput of Production: Kate Berry
Managing director: Jennifer Sofio Hall

The Invisible Man
Title Design Studio: Greenhaus GFX
Executive Creative Director: Helen Greene
Creative Director: Paul Holtzhausen
Technical Managing director & Lead Creative person: Matt Seckman
Drone by: Beverly Hills Aerials
Music: Benjamin Wallfisch

My Psychedelic Love Story
Directed by: Errol Morris
Music by: Paul Leonard-Morgan
Film Editing by: Steven Hathaway
Art Managing director: Carl Sprague
Graphics: Jeremy Landman
Animators: Brian Practice, David Practice, Steven Do
Storyboard Artist: Raymond Prado
Visual Effects by: Unleashed VFX
VFX Supervisor/Lead VFX Artist: Jerry Spivack
Visual Effects Artists: Eric Due south. Rosenthal, Stephen Grimm
Paint Artist: Ron Crabb

Defending Jacob
Production Studio: Yu+Co
Artistic Director: Garson Yu
SVP/Executive Producer: Carol Wong
Executive Producer: Ryan "Reno" Robertson
Art Director/Lead Designer: James Robertson
Technical Managing director/Pb Compositor: Gregory Jones
Animator/Compositor: Yuee Seo
Art Manager (Concept Evolution): Ed Bakery
Researcher (Concept Development): Rick Spitznass
Designers (Concept Development): Grace Kang, Lydia Kim, Mulan Leong-Suzuki
Editor: Sam Schlenker
Matte Painters: Daveed Shwartz, Reuben Corona
Live Action Producer: Nick DeSantis
Director of Photography: Wojciech Kielar
Set Design/Structure: Justin McClain
I/O Manager: Latoria Ortiz
Product Assistants: Denis Lavinski, Anthony Zucco
Serial Music: Atli Örvarsson

Trivial America
Title Design: Teddy Blanks, CHIPS
Music: "Udi Baba" Written by Anand Bakshi, Anandji Veerji Shah, Kalyanji Veerji Shah; Performed by Asha Bhosle
"Doo Wop (That Thing)" Written by Lauryn Hill; Performed by Quantic & Anita Tijoux
"Chukwu Fulum Nanya" Performed past Eastward.C. Arinze
"Lonely People" Written by Catherine Fifty. Peek, Dan Peek; Performed by America
"Fumbira Abaana" Performed by Kawaliwa & Mary feat. AGS Boys
"Bang Bang" Written by Sonny Bono; Performed by Betty Chung

The Good Lord Bird
Main Title Sequence Created by: King and Land, LLC
Executive Producer: Jerry Torgerson
Creative Director: Efrain Montañez
Art Manager:Eduardo Guisandes
Animators: Abigail Fairfax, Josh Lewis, Eduardo Guisandes
Producer: Ryan Lowrie
Title Theme: "Come on Children, Let's Sing" by Mahalia Jackson
Client: Blumhouse
EP/Artistic Director: Padraig McKinley
EP: Olga Village
Producers: Alex Espinoza, Adan Orozco

Feels Good Man
Based on Original Artwork by: Matt Furie
Animated by: Jenna Caravello, Arthur Jones, Nicole Stafford, Khylin Woodrow
Motion Graphics & Design: Arthur Jones
Additional Blitheness past: Joseph Bennett, Drew Blatman, Angelo Hatgistavrou
Music by: Ari Balouzian, Ryan Hope
Closing Vocal Mixed past: Daniel Long

Playgrounds Festival 2020
Produced past and featuring The Panics
Directed by: Erwin van den IJssel
Producer: Liene Berina
Additional Animation: Federica D'Urzo
Music & Sound Design by: Amp. Amsterdam
Special thanks to: Anneka O'Brien, Hugo Morais, Leon van Rooij

Lovecraft Country
Title Design Studio: Antibody
Illustrations: Ken Taylor
Series Music by: Laura Karpman, Raphael Saadiq

Raised by Wolves
Title Blueprint Studio: Studio AKA
Director: Steve Small
Producer: Nikki Kefford-White
Animation/Artworking: Marcus Armitage, Kristian Andrews, Martin Oliver
3D FX simulation: Kristian Fjellerup Olesen, Rob Chapman
3D Modelling: Raymond Slattery
Compositing: Marcus Armitage, Kristian Andrews, Will Eager
Editor: Nic Gill
Opening Titles Music Written and Performed by: Mariam Wallentin, Ben Frost

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