How did you discover your interest in designing motion graphics and get started in the field? We definitely arrived through an unmarked side door—or broke in during the party and stole some appetizers. We each have worked in wildly different worlds before coming to the creative arts, whether defining brands, designing physical spaces, science research or personal art practices. We consider ourselves to be visual problem solvers and experimenters first and foremost, and that most often happens to be expressed through film. For main titles, we enjoy the distillation process itself—the defining of what makes a show unique. From this, we build outward to find visual solutions that hit this mark. Uncovering these is very satisfying, and we enjoy drawing upon our wide range of interests to do so.
What led you to establish your Seattle-based production company Plains of Yonder, and how would you describe your style? It was, in part, a hopeful experiment. Could we make a living as independents, working outside a set system? We opted for what we playfully call a “digital caravan of artists and problem solvers.” Our long-term partners live all over the world. Some relationships go back as far as 20 years, but we’re always on the lookout for new co-conspirators. We tailor our teams exactly to the job, and this affords us the ability to do vastly different kinds of jobs. We surround ourselves with likeminded individuals who enjoy experimenting and tackling things that don’t have a roadmap.
While we don’t have a set style we aim for, a few throughlines keep showing up in our work. The natural world is a constant source of inspiration. Katrina has a background in the biological sciences, and we both spent our childhood loose in nature, whether in the desert as Katrina did or the woods like Mark. Our work also tends to include some element of the hand-built, so maybe our style might be more related to process. In our projects’ timelines, we like to build in time to work with new materials or techniques without an exact end result in mind—to experiment until we get the emotional quality we seek. We are also ruthless in winnowing material down in an attempt to identify surprising elements when making a piece. Lastly, our work often has a psychological quality to it that our audience might feel more than rationally see.
Since your team and location starkly contrast with the big four main title production companies based in Los Angeles, what advantages do small studios have, such as forging stronger connections with showrunners? As for being outside Los Angeles, yes—we miss out on physical proximity and ease. However, we find the outsider lens to be helpful. We live in a time that makes it infinitely easier than ever before in history to not have to be in one physical location.
It is, in fact, really important to us to create a real connection with showrunners. We love it when you can feel the passion a showrunner has for their show buzzing off of them. When they are looking for unique answers and ideas, when they put trust in you, it’s very rewarding. It’s easy to be motivated to solve complex problems when there is freedom, trust and room to be surprised. Is that different from the big houses? Likely no, but maybe there are less layers that the passion has to flow to reach everyone working on a project.
We lead the concept phase and direct and edit everything we take on. Ninety percent of the concepts we pitch are our own; the remainder are done in tandem with very trusted artist-designers. We can assure a show that we will be there personally working on the piece the whole time. This concentrated connection directly with showrunners can lead to more direct, clear communication. There are not many layers of separation from show input to hands crafting.
Additionally, our team benefits from being scattered all over the world. They are a very talented bunch in their own right but also gifted at a certain form of multitasking: raising kids, being musicians and painters, and earning degree simultaneously, among other things. In short, they get to keep their other dreams and interests alive.
Our inspirations are wildly different from each other. At times, we miss that everyone is not in the same physical space, for that shorthand can be electric. But, we also recognize that the variation coming from broad life experiences benefits the work greatly. We have teammates who might only take one job a year in this arena; hence, they couldn’t work at a large company, but they are very inspired for that one concentrated burst. Plains of Yonder might be small, but we’re a collaborative bunch, and we have a lot of faith, admiration and trust in each other.
One renowned project that has garnered you an Emmy nomination is the titles for season two of The White Lotus. To what would you attribute its lasting power as an iconic main title sequence? First and foremost, the show was a global hit. You probably wouldn’t remember our titles if that didn’t happen. That said, it did strike a magically emotional chord through a combination of simplicity and mischief.
Through our titles, we hope to create a psychological connection to audiences and reward them for their attention. A core team of four from our small company, including the two of us, got to dive deep into making this sequence, and the experience was intense and all consuming—almost like method acting, where we all lived and breathed the world of The White Lotus intensely for a spell. The idea of working with still art to tell a story has a sort of timeless, storybook quality to us that really connected to audiences. It was lush, funny, weird, perplexing and mysterious.
Other than The White Lotus, what have been some of your other favorite title sequences to create? We are really grateful for the opportunity to work on The Rings of Power title sequences for two seasons now. The showrunner and executive production team have been so trusting of us, so we were given the freedom to just make great, powerful moving artwork to open their show.
The Rings of Power was born from the idea of visualizing sound, which connects directly to J. R. R. Tolkien’s creation story in Middle Earth of the universe being sung into existence. We used a scientific phenomenon called cymatics—a way of visualizing sound. The symmetrical patterns that form feel close to magical, and the aspect of continual change was very aligned to the themes of the show—and make a good statement on the creative process, in general—that creative forces can rise from chaos. We were able to take something real, something physical and something inherently small like sand, and we used it to craft a title that feels epic and dramatic, one that conveys creation and destruction across eons of time.
We’re also super proud of our titles for The Decameron, an animated sequence involving hordes of rats. The idea required us to animate many scenes by hand, but we also needed scenes involving thousands of rats—for which we used a lot of experimental code and particle systems. It was a grand study involving wildly different techniques that needed to look like one lexicon in the end. The final piece really creates a lot of feeling and mood for us; it’s sacred, profane, funny, dark and beautiful all at once. Again, huge credit to the showrunner for giving us so much room to push the edges of the category.
For us, main titles are a chance to reimagine the show metaphorically. If we have captured the spirit of a series well, then the main titles become a powerful, recognizable visual identity.”
How did you combine hand-drawn animation with cutting edge 3-D and particle work for The Decameron’s title sequence? We knew we wanted the personality and charm of seeing an individual rat on the screen: going down holes, coming out other holes, scratching, searching, suffering, cuddling, mating, dying and even seemingly communicating with the viewer. We knew that it was about old-school character animation, so we drew every rat in those scenes frame by frame, hand-texturing each rat for thousands of frames.
The second part of the story was about “the hoard,” a metaphor for the Black Plague and its unstoppable, ever-mutating virulence. It is also a metaphor for the chaos unleashed in times of great peril, the mad crush for survival. The hoard consisted of thousands of rats on the screen at once, evolving, changing and scurrying into new forms and imagery. That required a lot of experimentation with our CG particle team working to break and evolve the particle simulation program tyFlow. We were really after integrating flaw and imperfection into the rats’ behavior—having some of them wander off, some jump, some look determined and some look lost—but as a whole, the horde needed to retain the poetic, dreamlike quality that tyFlow can imbue visuals with. We also worked hard to get the CG rats to look and behave like the hand-drawn ones, which was by far the biggest challenge. It required texturing the rats with hand-drawn textures, creating a bevy of different gaits for their individual motion and continually introducing a chaotic variety.
A common thread among your title sequences is your preference for creating designs by hand rather than working purely with digital media. How does this approach empower your work? It’s probably born from our affinity for real-world, hand-built stories. We really aim to create work that will resonate across decades of time, and hand-forged work may stand up to time’s scrutiny better. It’s also true that we work out of a small space filled with feathers, ink, wood and clay. We are all makers at heart; we like to feel things with our own hands. But don’t get us wrong—we appreciate the power of the computer to mold items as well. Often, our work hybridizes the two.
We often conceptualize stories from basic analog ideas, even if those concepts end up being completely digitally built. An example of this is our main title sequences for Apple TV+’s series Time Bandits, a show geared at families. Katrina came up with a concept connecting time and space by the children’s game of Cat’s Cradle. It even has a black hole kaleidoscope in it. So, it grew from visceral, playful objects to a fairly sophisticated CG project, but its power came from audiences connecting to known objects and its lighthearted tone.
How do main title graphics inform the identity of a show and its related media? Main titles, especially in television, often become sort of the “brand” for the show. They are the only consistent elements across seasons. Marketing departments often leverage that art for the show identity for outdoor advertising and red carpets. It’s flattering to see the work shown in other formats—and also always a surprise. We’ve received many requests from interior designers and individuals seeking to purchase the actual wallpaper from The White Lotus’s season one titles, which is a great compliment as it never physically existed. It was all designed and painted digitally, but we did work hard to create a sense of volume, shadows and flaws to make the viewer feel like they were in real hotel suites. For us, main titles are a chance to reimagine the show metaphorically. If we have captured the spirit of a series well, then the main titles become a powerful, recognizable visual identity.
Do you have any advice for designers just starting out in their careers? Even if you have to sneak it in, make sure your own inner artist is still alive in your work as a commercial artist. If you like snails, put a snail somewhere in your work. Try to put a piece of yourself and your view of the world in everything you do.
Stay true to your worldview. If you think the world is a funny, absurd place, seek out places, projects and collaborators that can help that view thrive. Experiment heavily!
Don’t believe you need to throw money at a project to make it good. And always be willing to throw away ideas. ca
