CHRISTIAN ARNSPARGER
Mr. Robot Main Title
For my Branding class at SCAD, I was tasked to create a main title open for a network TV show, and I chose the USA original Mr. Robot. I've always loved this show, and thought it would be the perfect show to develop a cohesive visual language for a main title and show packaging.
Independent creation.
The process for this project was thorough and lengthy. It took some serious attempts + fails (or, exploration) to settle on my final aesthetic style. At first I was inspired by architectural photography that resulted in high contrast images. Specifically I was inspired by contemporary photographers Gianni Galassi and Serge Najjar. Both photographers explore unique views of urban landscapes with high contrast imagery. Originally, I attempted to create simple abstractions of similar imagery in Cinema4D, which never seemed to fit with my intended style.
Below are a series of research and inspiration for this original style. Combining light and shadow to create forms and shapes seemed to be a compelling start. After collecting these, I felt I had a consistent vision to begin developing my main title, but as I started, it still didn't feel like it should.
This is one of my first completed style frames, combining the themes of light and shadow with a color palette fit for the show. After a few round of iterations, I wasn't happy with it.
I began to think more about how I could make a frame like this more interesting. Some sort of texture or additional elements might make this work. This is when I began to find and collect all sorts of financial and government related documents/imagery. I scanned in dollar bills, found imagery online of financial documents, and with a little circumventing of Photoshop's counterfeit detector, I was beginning to arrive on my final style. Using lines of code as a displacement map over a color shifted dollar bill, an aesthetic style was slowly developing into something I was happy with. Here is an initial (and still rough) exploration.
And some more color adjustments brought me here:
I expanded this style to include imagery of the show's location: New York City, specifically imagery that symbolizes American ideals: freedom, liberty, etc. which the show highlights as faulty and inauthentic. Through color inversions and deconstructing financial and government iconography, this main title plays into the themes of the show.
As part of this project, I also developed a comprehensive network show package, shown below:
