The Opening Title Sequence That Makes ‘Smoke’ Burn with Mystery

Dennis Lehane‘s Apple TV+ series “Smoke” is one of the most absorbing and unpredictable dramas of the year, an adaptation of the true crime “Firebug” podcast that throws a major plot twist at the audience at the end of episode two and then keeps the surprises coming right up until the season finale. Creating an opening credit sequence that captures the show’s sense of menace, mystery, and intrigue while incorporating elements of the story — without giving away any of the series’ secrets — was a tall order for award-winning design studio Digital Kitchen.

The artists at Digital Kitchen had two advantages as they began conceptualizing the title sequence. The first was that the music, an unreleased original track by Thom Yorke titled “Dialing In,” was in place from the beginning, giving the filmmakers a tone to work from and a rhythm to cut the images to. The other advantage was access to at least half of the show’s episodes. “Sometimes we only get a logline to tell us what the show is going to be,” Nicoll said. “Usually it’s scripts, sometimes it’s a pilot. On this one, they had already gotten through a lot of the episodes, so we got to dive into it more.”

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The first step in creating the credits, which would depict an arsonist’s burning ritual in reverse, was to come up with a list of items to destroy. The filmmakers began with a list that Lehane created based on the story, then set about conducting extensive tests to see what burned most evocatively on camera. “We wanted them all to start in the same kind of charcoal briquette state,” Nicoll said of the first image viewers would see of each object before the reverse photography revealed its true nature. “Some got dropped off the list because the way they burned wasn’t as interesting.”

‘Smoke’Digital Kitchen

There was also the question of exactly how to burn the objects, a problem art director and cinematographer Rachel Brickel solved during the testing process. “I started with heat guns and fire from an actual match, and then propane torches,” Brickel said. “We found out pretty quickly that was the way to go, because this wasn’t really about things being on fire. It was about the transformation of the objects as they burned.” For that reason, Brickel tested numerous types of material for each object; a scrunchie, for example, had to be tested in cotton, elastic, and nylon forms to see which would burn the best.

Different materials bubbled differently and behaved differently,” Brickel said, adding that once the objects were decided upon, the team needed to create a hero object along with several dummy objects, “because once it’s burned, it’s gone. That’s why testing was so important — we had to make sure we knew what we were doing because we had a limited supply of objects.” On the shoot day, Brickel used a RED Raptor with macro lenses to capture the footage, “chasing whatever felt cool,” while a Blackmagic Pocket 6K was mounted above the table on a forklift to get a nice, clean locked off shot of everything.

One of the big challenges was figuring out what to place the objects on so that they would burn, but the platform would not. The solution the filmmakers settled on was to use borosilicate glass similar to what’s used in glass cooking trays. “We had these big trays and we ran through three of them, but they held up pretty well,” Brickel said.

‘Smoke’ Digital Kitchen

After the practical shoot, which lasted a couple of days including reshoots, art director and designer Peter Pak brought everything into After Effects to combine elements from different takes in the same shot, taking the best moments from multiple takes and compositing them into the powerful final images. “When you burn an object, it’s very difficult to make it perform in the way that you want it to,” Pak said. “For the logo, we were combining the way the letters would warp in one take and the way they would in another, and we combined it with some digital recreations of the fire and micro-cracks to make it perform exactly the way we wanted.”

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Pak also added camera moves and perspective changes that were saved for post-production because the filmmakers wanted to maximize their time on set and capture as many burning objects as possible. Pak also experimented with color palette, noting that he had more creative freedom than on a more conventional series where the palette is set by the location or era, or genre. “We played with a spectrum of approaches,” Pak said. “We tried sepia tones to make it look like old documents, we tried vivid colors to accentuate the flames. Eventually, we landed on a muted palette, and by making it more muted, we had to make sure that every color that showed was deliberate.”

For Nicoll, the moment of truth came when the images started to cut together with the Thom Yorke song. “That was the biggest excitement, seeing that rough cut,” he said. “There’s a bit of a leap of faith where you feel like these sequences will work together, but that was the moment where we saw, okay, this is going to work. As long as everything else goes according to plan, this is going to work out well.”

“Smoke” is currently streaming on Apple TV+.

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