For a series like Apple TV+’s Dark Matter, creating a main title is a daunting challenge. Main title designer Ronnie Koff needed to capture the mind-bending nature of the series while also creating a sequence that alludes to the scope of the story.
Dark Matter follows Jason (Joel Edgerton), a man abducted into an alternate version of his life, as he embarks on a journey through all the lives he could have lived while trying to get back to his real family. The box, which allows for interdimensional travel in the show, served as the main point of inspiration for Koff’s design. While the end result is a box, the pieces being puzzled together are representing the complex journey of the main character.
DEADLINE: Is the main title we see onscreen the original concept, or did it evolve through development?
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RONNIE KOFF: Well, we pitched three different concepts, totally different ideas. One was a live action approach, another one was a painterly style based on Daniela (Jennifer Connelly)’s paintings, and then the last was this abstract, crazy, mind-bending adventure. It came out of wanting to do something different and big, the idea was to express the scope of the show through the title sequence. Often the first episode of a show is the beginning, and it doesn’t open up to all the different facets and all the different world building that the show has to offer. So, in many ways, the title sequence can do that. It could introduce you to how big this is going to be in a few seconds before the show begins.
DEADLINE: What was your inspiration for the abstract cube being pieced together?
KOFF: In the show, a main kind of character is the box, this catalyst or this entry point into all these different worlds. We essentially created an abstraction of that box, and the puzzle within that box expresses Jason’s complex nature of dealing with multiple versions of himself and trying to get back to his family while dealing with obstacles. The pieces are shifting and evolving and changing, so we’re expressing his journey through the box, which is already a character in the show, we just looked at it in a slightly different way. It’s this big maze-like chessboard of ideas expressing Jason’s journey to find his family, his real family.
We developed a process for creating the concrete in Cinema 4D so it looks photo real, because we wanted it to feel almost like a model that someone made and poured actual concrete into molds. So, we did some development work on creating a kind of material that feels realistic. It feels sculpted, but it also could be looked at as very small and as very large at the same time, so it was a cool way of thinking about it because we’re constantly shifting scales where it feels like a miniature, but then it feels larger than life. We’re playing with the perceptions of point of view, and that’s what the show is essentially about.
DEADLINE: When I first watched the main title, the look of the concrete made me think it was going to be handmade or stop motion. Obviously, that notion was gone when the giant hand came in.
KOFF: Yeah, we tried to make it feel authentic, but then have these surreal aspects to it that make it a little bit of an out-of-world or out-of-time experience. We did it all with a single camera, which I thought was really interesting. I love the idea of a connected journey and feeling like you maintain this travel that feels surprising, but you’re not necessarily breaking the spell by cutting through it. We initially did something that had a lot of cuts to it and, with the music, the cuts didn’t really add to the storytelling nature of it. So, we scrapped the editorial approach and we went with a single camera because a single camera in many ways expresses the character’s point of view. It’s like looking through their eyes in a way. They’re always shifting point of view, but as human beings, you’re not cutting. You’re examining everything in real time, so it had an interesting additive element with that aspect.