An in-depth exclusive interview with Main Title Creative Director PATRICK CLAIR discussing his Emmy nomination for Outstanding Main Title Design with the creation of the main title for AppleTV’s SILO.
SYNOPSIS: SILO is the story of the last ten thousand people on earth, their mile-deep home protecting them from the toxic and deadly world outside. However, no one knows when or why the silo was built and any who try to find out face fatal consequences. Rebecca Ferguson stars as Juliette, an engineer, who seeks answers about a loved one’s murder and tumbles onto a mystery that goes far deeper than she could have ever imagined, leading her to discover that if the lies don’t kill you, the truth will.
Created by Graham Yost and based on the book series SILO by Hugh Howey, SILO is Executive Produced by Yost and Morten Tyldum. SILO is directed by Tyldum, Adam Bernstein, Bertie Ellwood, David Semel, and Amber Templemore. Boasting an all-star cast led by Rebecca Ferguson, this dystopian underground world of SILO features, among others, Common, Tim Robbins, David Oyelowo, Harriet Walter, Will Patton, and Rashida Jones.
Creative head of production studio Antibody, PATRICK CLAIR has wowed us with his already award-winning main titles as Creative Director on TV shows such as “True Detective”, “The Crown”, and “Westworld”, and now garnering another Emmy nomination for his work, on SILO.
Always key to the main title design of any film or television series is that it captures not only the essence and elements of the film or series but that it captures the audience’s attention. What Patrick and his team have done with the main titles for SILO does that and more, enticing us with imagery that is creative and telling, languid and alive with fluidity, building on story elements covering the whole of season one within the beauteous imagery of the title itself, making us want to see more.
With SILO’s main titles, we are spellbound as we see a cycle of life going from the sun to trees, seedlings, a fallen apple, going into the silo itself and traveling downward from light into darkness and into the bowels of engineering heartbeat of the silo only to slowly rise up and emerge into a glowing ball of sun once again. The sequence is striking, mesmerizing, and emotional. And as we watch the series episodes unfold, we can’t help but notice that touchstones to the elements of SILO are all woven within the Main Title Design.
Digging down into the construction of the Main Title Design, PATRICK CLAIR discusses specifics of the design and the emotion, noting that when crafting the main titles, “it’s always about getting the deepest possible understanding of the world that the creators of the show are trying to make. Morten (Tyldum) and Graham (Yost) were so generous with their time.” Watching part of the show early and reading the scripts helped Patrick find his footing with the title design. Hugh Howey, author of the “Silo” books” had laid out a “very rich and detailed world” that allowed Yost and Tyldum to build on that and give Patrick a real understanding of their vision from which two things were very clear. The silo is a house, a home, just on a very grand scale which meant the titles had to be about the architecture of the silo; the design of the silo, the machinery of the silo; “this gigantic brutalist thing. But it also had to be about people. And that was the challenge. How do we take this brutal being of tunnels and stairways and rock and concrete, and how do we convey the life inside it?” And that’s where the real work began for Patrick.
Breaking it down, Patrick took me through his design process and creative considerations, including, but not limited to:
- approaching this as an examination of human life underground; sculptures people have made from molten metal; ant colonies which are sculptures in their own right with intricate passages and tunnels
- parallels between the silo and the human body where staircases become spines and DNA
- always looking for the cycle of life and the structure of society
- discovery of B&W photos from the turn of the 19th/20th century in England with time lapses of railway stations with individual people becoming blurs like rivers of life flowing through these railway stations where individual lives became indistinct; the presence of thousands and thousands of people moving through the space
- challenges of co-opting that photographic technique to show generation upon generation of people living within the structure of the silo and giving it history and meaning
- influences – photography, art, architecture, real estate architecture, time-lapse photography, nature photography, cave systems, subterranean life; the structure of DNA
- marriage of music and imagery; providing some early visual tests to the music team for them to start composing
- adjusting visuals to fit the music that came back from the music team; tweaking animation and music
- color; “starving” the audience of certain colors and then “rewarding them later in the piece: starting with muted yellow color scheme and then moving into something warmer and more saturated orangey-red and then into the sea and ultimately the last turn of the sun
- working in an “abstract design space” with color
- typography and placement of the titles themselves
- goal is to show life and not just stone and concrete; how we render humanity into the images; focus on the living things inside the space as opposed to the space itself
- showing the rich history of this society and the generations that have come before and lived
- timeline of the main title process
- and more!
TAKE A LISTEN. . .
by debbie elias, exclusive interview 08/01/2024
SILO is streaming on AppleTV!
