In order to maintain control and hold onto their status of privilege, those in power fabricate an immense war built on lies and visual manipulations, blinding society's perception. A web of lies are created on screen, reconstructing their form through a series of interchangeable text and imagery that live within mass media, overlapping with imagery of the real world.
This Project was created alongside with my friend Zohar Pomerantz during our senior year of school at the 'Title Sequence and Broadcasting' course taught by Adam Feinberg. The semester-long brief was to choose a book and to adapt it to a TV series, then create a title sequence one minute in length that depicts the essence and the overall theme of the story. We chose the dystopian, sci-fi novel, "The Penultimate Truth," by Phillip K. Dick; this book centers around the story of World War III and the way he views and criticizes basic human nature. We chose this book because we are both very into the genre and the overall storyline peaked our interest; And as we dug deeper into the project, what we discovered that excited us most was just how relevant the story is in our world today, even though it had been written 60 or so years ago.
"The Penultimate Truth" follows three different storylines as told by different characters, where World War III is flaring outside and millions of innocent people are rushed to shelter. They have been living in underground tanks since the war began about 15 years ago... or so the people thought. Living beneath the surface, the only means of communication with the outside world is through the televised daily news given by the 'Protector,' Talbot Yancy, which relays the continuous fear of nuclear destruction and radiation instability. However, up on the surface, the outside world is living in a much different reality, where peace coexists and the elite rule over the land, living wealthy lives and working hard in order to keep up the big lie that they have been forging for years.
Starting on such a long and complex process isn't simple, so the first step we took was to gather as much information from the book that we thought was intriguing so as to get a detailed understanding of the storyline. We thought that the best approach to build a solid foundation was to split up for the first week of the project, giving each of us individual space without any distraction or swaying of ideas. Doing so allowed us to come up with different 'mind-maps', thoughts, and directions, which ultimately created and a large database of visual and textual information that will guide us along our process.
The main theme of the book is about lies and control, where the powerful are depicted as 'dominant' and the innocent depicted as 'subservient.' Using this theme as an anchor for our search, we were able to spread out further and explore a wider variety of motifs which we narrowed down to the ones that seemed to address our project best. Our first motif revolved around the idea of manipulations and the illusions they create, with references to Plato's "Allegory of the Cave", comparison of different realities, and the construction of lies.
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1. Petri dish - seeing the bacteria and organisms in abstract shapes, then zooming in and the shapes become images and objects and textures.
2. Magic tricks - during one magical act on stage the magician will demonstrate through different objects, techniques, and angles how the ultimate lie is constructed.
3. Web of lies -lies are "strung together" as strings and threads (lines in angles) as each new lie is added to the overall web, entangling different lies (scenes and intercuts) together, and only if the web is cut or dismantled the truth is revealed.
4. Check the 'fine print' - using a magnifying glass, new things emerge that weren't noticeable to the naked eye, revealing information that was manipulated on documents, photos, texts, etc.
After many detailed and thorough brainstorming sessions, we landed on the theme of 'a web of lies,' where we could use the visual allegory of strings as the representation of lies and the web as a physical manifestation of how the lies are so entangled and wrapped within one another, 'taking over the world' and ultimately, blinding the viewer from the truth. And to tackle this idea, we decided on the approach of rendering CGI string and embedding them within found-footage material in After Effects.
Once we had several tests of visual frames and the progression of different storyboards, we developed a workflow of building storyboards using found-footage that we intended to use in the project itself, building scene sequences in a 'mix-and-match' style. Although we couldn't have predicted, this workflow and design process was what ultimately helped us in finalizing our idea and helping us overcome obstacles we faced later in the process.
Our story had evolved with each passing week, where we were always checking ourselves and seeing what part of the story works and what isn't sitting just right yet. A big chunk of our time was spent on continuously sharpening the story's motifs, focusing on the essence of what it is we are trying to tell the audience. With each week our image bank expanded, flowing in new and more accurate visuals.
At some point, sometime in the middle of the semester, we had come to the conclusion that of all the versions we had tested, there was one that carried the most weight and felt the most correct - 'the evolution of a lie: from innocence to awareness.' We found a video of two children's eyes staring and following the camera, an image that seemed to hit us in the gut because it was exactly the kind of visual representation we were looking for - something that represented innocence and lack of control. This motif is became our new anchor, one that we linked to the idea of childhood and used from this point onward in our title.
We had built several storyboards, we even had a videoboard all ready to go... but then we hit a big obstacle. We had viewed our footage several times and gone over all the motifs and ideas we had written down, but something felt "off." What we realized was that our story, as interesting as it seemed to be in terms of the visual language, was actually not precise enough to what we really wanted to say; we felt that there wasn't enough 'glue' to hold it together. Retroactively looking back, this was the most crucial turning-point of our project, one that allowed us to shake everything up and clean off what wasn't working and refocus our energies back to the original essence we had been trying to create.
The first and main thing that we realized was that the 'string' as a visual anchor was starting to unravel (pun intended); it started as a visual object and then later became a graphic layer embedded onto our footage, but in both cases the string wasn't working so long as we could physically view it. Ultimately, we felt that this obstacle was exactly what we needed in order to direct us to the most correct direction and final storyline.
In the book, the people living underground had been receiving their daily information (of what was happening above ground and in the war) through broadcasts and televised speeches. In a time where fake news is such a widespread topic in our society, we found that media is the best representation of power and relevant as a relatable theme. We associated the motif of media as a 'funnel' for lies to be spread through, where the ultimate lie is, of course, the war. Instead of string, media now took on the form of visual platforms for control and manipulation, twisting reality and blinding the truth.
We used the motif of childhood as a representation of submissiveness, where children don't have control over their lives, subjected to adults who tell them to do as they're told. Doing so, we depicted the power struggle between those in control and those that are controlled by them. And by combining such stark contrasts between war and childhood, were were able to incite strong emotional scenes.
In its early stages, our title was built on video found-footage, pieced together with intercuts and camera movements. The more we worked with the videos, the more we realized that it was holding back our freedom to create our own unique scenes. So instead, we chose to scrap the videos and begin an in-depth search of new still images. By using collage techniques, which allow for the combination of different elements, we layered ideas one on top of the other and created visual manipulations that seem to coexist in the same environment. Since all of our work together was done remotely, we found the best method for working on the footage was by building sequence "puzzles" on Miro Boards and visualizing the movements and connections between different scenes.
During post production, a lot of our energies went into testing out many fonts and font combinations. Our first thought was to play with a mix of white and black test, representing above and below ground. However, that didn't seem to work well enough and instead we discovered that by playing with italics vs. regular font we were able to create a much more interesting contrast. By placing elegant and clean typography onto our rough imagery, we could magnify the contradiction taking place in the book.
Well that's about it! The process we went through with our title was intense (in the best way possible), complex, and with countless hours of research and work... but most importantly, it was the biggest learning experience we could have asked for as aspiring motion designers. Our vision was pretty clear to us early on, so we wanted to be in full control of our process at every step of the way, making sure that no aspect was left unattended. Through all of this, we developed our own unique work-styles and techniques, where along the way we also improved on our motion-design skills. Our title project taught us how serious and hardworking we both are as designers, and more importantly taught us a whole lot about team dynamics. We're both very happy to have gotten the opportunity to be in this studio course, it is definitely a benchmark for the future work to come.
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