Titles as Appetizers

Imaginary Forces Uses CINEMA 4D to Tell a Cinematic Visual Story in Boardwalk Empire’s Main Titles.

Creating a visual metaphor that tells a sweeping story while capturing the feel of a particularly tumultuous time in history in just minutes is no easy task. But Imaginary Forces bills itself as a creative agency that likes a good challenge. Time after time they have proven how adept they are at constructing narrative titles and other sequences for film and broadcast, including Minority Report, Terminator Salvation, Transformers: Revenge of the Fallen and Mad Men.

So when asked, they took the job of creating main titles for HBO’s epic series, Boardwalk Empire. And using footage they shot of actor Steve Buscemi at the beach, a lot of whiskey bottles and visual effects created with MAXON’s CINEMA 4D and other software, they designed and produced a sequence that illuminates the show’s central themes. It also makes clear that Buscemi’s character, Nucky Thompson, rules the boardwalk in tumultuous, prohibition-era Atlantic City just after World War I.

“It was a total collaboration with the guys at HBO and Terry [Terence Winter, the show’s creator and executive producer] really wanted to give a sense of the change happening during this very pivotal decade in history,” says Imaginary Forces’ Karin Fong, who co-directed the titles with Michelle Dougherty.

Early ideas centered around the elaborate 1920s-style boardwalk that was built in New York City for the show. Then, Tim Van Patten, one of the show’s executive producers, pointed out that Buscemi’s character is the one constant in what is essentially a storm of change, taking things in a more metaphorical direction. “Women get the vote, World War I is over, alcohol is illegal and we all knew that if we were going to go with a grand metaphor it had to be something that would last,” Fong recalls.

It’s possible to imagine other ways to make clear that Buscemi’s Nucky Thompson stands apart from the world over which he lords but none seem as spot-on as the one the team chose. Standing on the seashore with the surf lapping at his dress shoes, Thompson casually smokes and scans the cloudy, foreboding horizon as a bounty of unopened whiskey bottles tosses about in the waves and wash up on sand around his feet before he ambles back up to the boardwalk unscathed. “It’s like he sees the tides bringing his future to him in the form of liquor,” says Fong.

Trouble at sea

How hard is it to create what looks like a whole lot of whiskey bottles floating around in the waves? Much harder than you’d think. In fact, the bottles were the team’s biggest challenge for a lot of reasons, says Jeremy Cox, Imaginary Forces’ visual effects supervisor. For starters, during the two-day shoot at the beach, the bottles were intentionally shot without labels.

Later, it was decided that the bottles did need labels after all. And one more thing—they also needed to have a cap rather than a cork. “My initial plan was to do a 3D track on the bottle and a 3D label and cap,” Cox explains. “But that didn’t work so I did a single frame render of a label and cap in CINEMA 4D and tracked it in 2D to composite onto the bottle in After Effects, and it worked surprisingly well.”

While bottles in the foreground were shot on location, bottles seen rolling and floating further out in the water were made in Maya and composited in After Effects. Close-ups of a bottle bobbing in the water were shot in a tank, and cutaways to bottles crashing against the underside of a pier were shot in California. The actual pier, seen in the background of some of the shots, was made in CINEMA 4D. “We were watching the edit and thought it would be interesting to see a pier in the distance,” Cox recalls. “That’s one of the ways CINEMA 4D is so useful. You know, if you didn’t plan something you can just jump in there quickly and make what you need.”

Slight of hand

About halfway through the titles, there’s a shot that appears to rotate around Buscemi’s character’s head as he scans the horizon. Only that’s not really what happens. What had been planned as a shot with an expansive, arcing camera move around Buscemi against a time-lapse sky evolved into a rotation around Buscemi as he sat on a turntable in front of a greenscreen.  

The plan might have worked had it not been for one thing, says Cox. It wasn’t humanly possible for Buscemi to keep his eyes from scanning the room as the table turned. “To his credit, I don’t think anyone could have kept their eyes still in that situation,” says Cox. “But we couldn’t make his darting eyes look like they were looking out at the water, so I took fixing that problem as a personal challenge.”

Cox and his team did a 3D track rotation of Buscemi’s head. Next they took the shot plate and projected it out of the camera so it became a texture on the low-res geometry of the actor’s head before shooting it as it rotated. “So the camera in was rotating with him, essentially, as if there was no motion at all on his head,” Cox explains. Footage of Buscemi’s fixed gaze was taken from After Effects and projected back onto the rough CINEMA 4D geometry and re-photographed.

Stylistically, it’s fun to apply cinematic techniques to titles turning visual language into shorthand for the entire stories, says Fong. While it’s important to create something that makes sense for a show, there is a lot of room to take on broader themes and bigger metaphors. “Titles are a signature for a show, really,” she says. “They’re kind of an intense appetizer before the main course and they draw people in and set the mood.”

Imaginary Forces
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