fuckyeahgoodomens:

When director Douglas Mackinnon asked Peter Anderson and his studio to design the opening titles for Good Omens, the Amazon Prime TV series based on the book by Terry Pratchett and Neil Gaiman, he had only one major stipulation.

“He said,” recounts Anderson, “‘I want you to promise me that you send us emails that start with, ‘This might sound absolutely mad, but our idea is dot dot dot’. That set the tone for the creative process, which was wonderful.”

It’s fair to say the London-based Peter Anderson Studio came through with flying colors on that brief, Anderson himself describing Good Omens’ animated titles as “a totally bonkers mishmash of all animation styles in a way where they feel as if they belong together.”

The titles certainly feel like something inspired, at least in part, by Terry Jones’ famous animated cut-out vignettes in Monty Python’s Flying Circus. The twist is that Good Omens’ opener employs illustration, physical props, character animation, 3D and even live-action footage to foretell the show’s story about the clash of Heaven and Hell and the coming apocalypse.

“Our titles really mimic the drama,” says Anderson, “because in the show, for instance, you’ve got a classic English countryside and then suddenly a spacecraft that’s been drawn by a child and re-made in 3D comes flying down and aliens come out that have duck heads. We had to work in that same totally bonkers spirit.”

In the opening titles, a myriad characters from Good Omens are in procession — often via escalators up (and down) — to the end of the world. From concepts and storyboards, Peter Anderson Studio launched into a major exploratory process of generating imagery that directly referenced the show’s cast of people and creatures. Ultimately, all the characters seen in the titles actually began as “real,” live-action people.

“It’s me as many characters,” says Anderson. “And then there are different members of our studio wearing the costumes from the actual show, sometimes filmed on a green screen walking on a travelator. Then what we did is we cut them out and we made real people look like strange animations by tracking two-dimensional heads onto them.”

This is where things become even more surreal. Each one of the two-dimensional heads, reveals Anderson, are actually “in-disguise” representations of the show’s two lead actors, Michael Sheen and David Tennant, who play the angel Aziraphale and demon Crowley, respectively.

“The reason we did that,” states Anderson, “is that Neil said that he felt there was good and bad in everybody, and the angels and the demons represented the good and bad that exists within the world. So we’d take Michael and David’s faces and adapt them by, say, adding a mohawk or sunglasses, for example.”

That’s not the only detail to look out for in Good Omens’ opening titles, which warrant multiple viewings to catch several Easter eggs. Anderson says look out for a cactus wilting as a demon walks by, or even one moment where a someone realizes they are on a downward escalator path to Hell, only to start running up the people-mover the wrong way.

“Whether you interpret the titles as the characters choosing their sides to go to war, or as something where we all approach the end of the world and we’re going to go one way or the other, it’s up to you,” concludes Anderson. “I hope there are lots of double meanings in the storytelling.”