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INSIGHTS
Karin Fong
Stirring the Audience’s Appetite
Karin Fong designs TV and movie title sequences that promise other worlds. In one, a briefcase-swinging nerd dodges and rides 007-esque bullets. In another, illustrations depict a suave cat making mischief on a French inspector. Her sequences welcome viewers to lands near and far—the Southern California of the nerd-spy TV show Chuck and the international, mysterious world of The Pink Panther 2. Since graduating from college, Fong has refined her sense of story- telling for countless films, TV shows and brands, from a comic book–inspired Target commercial to a large-scale video installation for the Los Angeles Opera. Today, Fong is an Emmy-winning cofounder of the production company Imaginary Forces, where, as director and designer, she whets the appetites of film and television audiences with just enough narrative to make them hungry for more. —Esther Oh
How did you get your start in the film industry?
When I was studying art at Yale University, my senior thesis was an animated alphabet book. This led one of my professors to suggest that I work at the design and production company
R/GA, which was responsible for many iconic film pieces of the 1970s and 1980s, including
Superman and Alien. There, I interviewed with title sequence designer Kyle Cooper, who was about to move to Los Angeles to start the West Coast branch.
But before I went, I spent a season animating for the show Where in the World is Carmen Sandiego? at public television station WGBH in Boston. I had previously studied graphic design with the hope of working in children’s books, but this wonderful gig really swayed me toward film and video. It’s hard to resist using the magic of animation and the power of sound!
In what way do you set an emotional tone for viewers through your title sequence designs?
I want to tap into a sense of anticipation. I’d like the audience to yearn with curiosity. A title sequence can be like an appetizer to a meal. It teases you with what is to come and makes you hungrier for it!
It is very much about setting an emotional tone, which varies from story to story. For a comedy, you usually want to let people know that they are supposed to laugh. This was the design challenge
for Dead Man on Campus, one of my very first title designs. The film was based on the absurd idea that circulates during college—if your roommate commits suicide, you get an academic pass for that semester due to the emotional stress. For that project, we designed an “S.A.T.”—a suicide aptitude test—that showed different methods of killing oneself in multiple choice questions and diagrams. So right at the beginning of the film, you knew that something was off and that something funny was going on.
Sometimes films just need a certain energy at a particular moment, and the title design serves that. End titles can also be a way of reliving the film’s themes. For the high school comedy film The Duff, we worked the outtakes and credits into end titles that evoked social media interfaces, incorporating selfies and handles that the real-life cast members use. It made sense to connect to the audience in this way, since the story is all about posting, tweeting and other ways teens interact online.
Tell us about your research process.
Research is one of my favorite parts of the design process. The first thing my team and I do is immerse ourselves in the subject matter. If it’s for a film or a TV show, then we try to learn everything we can about the story. That can mean watching rough cuts of the film, watching selected shots and reading scripts. Looking at the produc- tion design and any references the filmmakers used is also a must.
If it’s a period piece, we’ll dive into the art, history and popular culture of the era. For instance, for the Sony PlayStation video game
32 Illustration Annual 2016