Caemeron Crain
The opening credits for Yellowjackets form one of the most striking title sequences in the history of television. When they debuted in Season 1 Episode 3, I felt compelled to write about them, and it wasn’t just about their style and composition. There are clues in there! And then, with Season 2, the sequence changed. New clues!
This interview isn’t so much about the clues as the conception and production of the Yellowjackets title. It was my pleasure to recently sit down with members of the team at Digital Kitchen who played a pivotal role in the creation of this sequence: Executive Creative Director Mason Nicoll and Art Director Rachel Brickel.
Caemeron Crain: Thanks so much for taking the time to talk to me today. I’m excited about it. I’ve been a fan of your work on Yellowjackets from the beginning, as I felt inspired to write on the opening title sequence from the moment I saw it in Season 1. I’m curious to start with how you got involved in doing the work on Yellowjackets, or, the starting point in terms of the idea for the credits sequence.
Mason Nicoll: Yeah, I can give you a little bit of the history. Between Rachel and I, I kind of led the crew in developing it, and then Rachel was really instrumental in not only kind of designing it out, but also she comes from a filmmaking background. So there’s a lot of stuff we shot… also figuring out the techniques. Just to kind of give you an idea of what my role was versus what Rachel was doing on it.
But, chatting with the showrunners, that was something where I was there at the beginning. They came to us. Both Ashley [Lyle] and Bart [Nickerson] were writers on Narcos, and we had done the title. So I know they had that connection there. But they also mentioned, when we first chatted with them, their love of True Blood, which was one we had done a long time ago. I mean, it’s definitely over ten years now.
So they came to us and they were pretty much wide open, like with a lot of titles. Sometimes a showrunner or director has a specific idea, and sometimes they’re just like, “hey, read the script and let me know what you think.” And they were a bit in between. There was a definitely an idea they had, more of kind of just like a vibe, as well as they just wanted to see what we thought. So, I believe they had the first cut of the pilot that we watched and then we read some of the scripts, and then what we usually do is we’ll sit for a bit, come back with ideas, including the one that they had some initial thoughts on. And then we go from there in terms of how we are going to develop the title. But interesting enough, the idea that they threw out, we started working on, but then we did a 180 and switched and picked a different idea.
Caemeron Crain: Can you tell me what that idea was?
Mason Nicoll: Yeah, yeah, it was interesting because there’s this kind of great, not only selection, but being able to define that kind of mid-90s feel, not only kind of esthetically, but I think people who grew up in the ‘90s kind of gravitate towards, like, oh, this feels accurate tonally. So a lot of that came from the music supervision. So the idea that the showrunners had was much more foreboding, I wouldn’t say horror, but it was like leaning into horror from a title sequence, and it was really inspired by these, like, Russian fairy tale illustrations, almost like etchings that you might see in an old Russian fairy tale book.
And so we took that, and we started developing. A lot of it was based around a Portishead song. So you can imagine that vibe is much different than what we went with. But it was pretty quick. I think we worked on the illustrative style for a couple of weeks, and then at some point we were doing an animatic to Portishead and people were like, you know, this doesn’t really fit.
And now, in hindsight, we kind of know with the song that was developed and this take that we landed on, this idea of these lost tapes—as if the girls had just with camcorders of the era filmed themselves leading up to Nationals, and we found these tapes almost kind of Blair Witch style and kind of cobbled them together, so it’s a mix of everything from everyday life to obviously stuff that you start to see in the upcoming season—we knew that that tonally, and kind of kinetically and musically, fit the show better. I think everybody… obviously Ashley, Bart, and Jonathan had more knowledge in terms like, yeah, this feels right… This is the way to go.
Caemeron Crain: If I can follow up quickly on a couple of things there I’m curious about. You mentioned the pilot, and that’s what you watched. Did you know that this opening credits sequence wouldn’t show up until Episode 3? Did you have any input on that?
Mason Nicoll: Not at all. And it was funny because I remember your article. Because it took a bit before we realized that the title just took on a life of its own. You know, a lot of times we’ll do a title and it presents the show in a way, but it’s not necessarily picked apart or examined, it’s just set. It’s a nice introduction, tonally or vibe wise. This one, it was because it didn’t show up till Episode 3, and then we started getting news that people were watching this back and examining frames.
I guess our purpose in making titles is, you know, we want to make sure it aligns with the creators of the show and it does justice to the series. And hopefully people don’t skip it. But you never really get that chance of it taking on this second wind where people then start to examine it. And especially once the show comes out, people realize there’s clues here, there’s things to… So I think that’s when I remembered, seeing your article recently, and then I was like, oh yeah, I remember this back after a couple weeks, we started seeing stuff being reported. And then that’s what jogged my memory, where I’m like, oh, I totally forgot that it came out on Episode 3, which is odd. You know, a lot of times a main title will come out on Episode 2, if not 1. But rarely does it come three in.
Caemeron Crain: I was curious because I thought it worked quite well. You know, it was like, I think the first episode hits with “Today,” and then the second one was “Mother Mother” and then by the third episode, we’re kind of in it. And because the credits do involve so much kind of darkness and the wilderness and everything, I thought it worked to withhold them until that point.
So, I was curious if you were involved in that. I’m also curious, in moving from that initial idea with the Portishead to the idea you landed on, did the song come first, or did your visuals come first, or did they kind of come at the same time?
Mason Nicoll: Oh, the visuals… from what I remember, after we scrapped the slower, more ominous Portishead, illustrated vibe, we picked a board that’s pretty close to the final sequence. And so I really quickly threw together an animatic, and I just cut it to Elastica’s “Stutter” because I was like, this has the pacing.
And we knew that Craig [Wedren] and Anna [Waronker] were always going to make an original song, but I wanted to at least get something out there that had that kind of in your face, like almost too fast, kind of kinetic quality. And so that song worked pretty perfectly. And then soon after that animatic, we got the first cut from Craig and Anna, who created the song, and it was pretty close.
It was slower and I think then we sped it up, not to the same tempo as Elastica, but it already had the bits there, because it’s this great song that feels like it fits with something that you would have heard in the ‘90s, but it’s also modern at the same time.
Caemeron Crain: Yeah, I think the song is great. I recall actually emailing a press rep or whatever to make sure, like, is this an original song or is this an obscure song from the ‘90s I don’t remember? I thought it was a really good.
Mason Nicoll: Yeah. And I know we had talked to Craig early on about music, and I know more of that was really between the showrunners and Craig, in terms of what it’s like lyrically as well as musically. But since he’s from a band from the ‘90s, it was also, I mean, he already has the foundation of like, I was there and so I get it, but I also want to make something that is new, new enough that people are interested and hopefully excited every week.
I mean, they did an amazing job, because even now, we have to watch it as we’ve updated every season. So we’ve heard it a lot. But it’s not something that gets tiring.
Caemeron Crain: Yeah, I agree.
You mentioned the idea of this being sort of found footage or camcorders, which I think is really interesting. I take it the distortion feeds into that. I wonder if you want to say any more about that, but I’m also curious about this kind of a skeleton of shots, as it were, that remain the same across seasons, that are things that aren’t in the show. Most iconic to me is Jackie doing the throat slit thing. And there’s party scenes and I’m wondering if you can tell me anything about where those shots came from, even.
Mason Nicoll: Yeah, yeah, I can let Rachel talk about that because she shot all of that stuff in the Lost Tapes idea. I mean, we shot more than enough to take up a whole title, but because it wasn’t with the actors on the show, we knew that it was going to have to support the idea of bringing in clips of the season, which I think came in a little bit later.
But yeah, we kind of mapped out a whole day from a story standpoint, like this is a day in the life of the Yellowjackets. You know, there’s practice and then there’s school life, and we go to a party and throw up in the parking lot. And then, so all those little bits we filmed on period correct 1990s camcorders. But then Rachel could talk about how we then got really, really into doing the effects practically… the fact that you find this footage later. So we were really invested in analog ways of glitching and being able to distort the footage, in a very specific way.
Rachel Brickel: Yeah, so basically, when we were shooting it, we wanted to make sure that we were almost acting as if we were one of the high schoolers. So, Mason was telling me, okay, it’s not about getting the camera still like you want it to be, but moving with them, like you’re partying with them. And, we went all around town to get these shots.
We went to my friend’s bodega, we went to a parking lot. There’s a point where we were in a parking lot, and we had a shopping cart that someone just found, like, in the middle of town. Bring the shopping cart over. That sounds like what a high schooler would do, just like messing around with it.
There is a point where we went back to my old college and we just had them walking around the lockers just to show, like, hey, look, maybe they were done with practice. So we wanted to create all the scenes, but then shoot it in a way that would be abstract enough that we could tear it apart with glitches.
And then also, we used practical elements, like I put glass prisms and things like that in front of camera to distort imagery so that you could kind of not tell whose face it was or things like that. And that was then piped into a CRT through a bunch of signals that were crossing each other, to create a dirty glitchy image.
And the great thing about a CRT is that it allows you to do that. It’s not going to tell you, oh, the signal’s corrupted. It’s going to take whatever you feed into it. So it really gave us the flexibility to really break the footage as much as possible. And then, in After Effects following that, we even took it apart even further and cut everything into pieces and merged clips together, creating these ghostly effects.
So not only were ghostly effects made analog, it was also done digitally. So Peter Pak and I were really very detailed with pulling these things apart to make them unrecognizable.
Caemeron Crain: Cool, I think the effect is great.
Mason Nicoll: It was pretty… I don’t know, it ended up being a lot more intense than we planned on. But it’s something now, I think even when we update it, we’re like, oh, boy, what did we get ourselves into? Because we had to reestablish that whole pipeline of going through an old CRT and then were filming off the CRT just so we can get proper resolution and then go from there.
We knew that there was going to be this base of footage and not all of it was going to stay, but it was fun to be able to kind of build a day in the life, as if it’s the other Yellowjackets, not the main actors, but it’s the other Yellowjackets. And so how much of that can we sprinkle in, knowing that we couldn’t have time with the the actors? But we did get, like the one shot you mentioned, Caemeron, of Jackie. We also went and pored through stuff that just never made it in, or that take, I think there was a part of that take that was in the pilot episode, but obviously her slitting her throat, looking in a camera, was after they cut, and she did that. So there was some B-roll stuff that we culled through, and that one has stuck. I can’t remember if there’s any others that stuck. And that one, interesting enough, is the one that most likely is never going to leave the sequence. You know, after every episode in every season. It’s like it’s become the ghost of Jackie, or ghost in the machine of Jackie, you know?
Caemeron Crain: Yeah, I don’t think it should leave the sequence.
Thinking about the visuals a little bit more, one thing that I’ve noticed is there are changes in the aspect ratio. Is there any logic to that? I don’t have technical terms at the ready, but I’m sure you know what I’m talking about.
Mason Nicoll: Yeah, yeah there was… I’m trying to remember the foundation. Part of it was inspired by music and having the edit break the traditional 4:3 the further into the sequence you get. So I think the original idea, and a lot of this… like Rachel was saying there’s a stuff we shot of an actress, which is really just her, like swinging her hair around and lights flashing, cut against like elements of forest.
So that’s stuff that we shot. And we always knew that it’s the idea that what they brought back with them from the forest is kind of like embedded in the video signal. And this is where we’re kind of getting geeked out with references like Blair Witch Project, as if stuff that’s true to the era kind of sticks 4:3 and stuff that’s like the ghost in the machine starts to break 4:3.
Now we’ve tweaked that a little bit… even going back to Season 1, we broke that rule when it was, I think, adult Natalie. And it was a swell in the music and she kind of looks to camera, and that’s one of the first times it broke. So part of that was a more of a musical choice.
But I think for the most part we try to stay to, oh, it’s more of those moments where you don’t know which character it is. It’s just like a flicker of hair and a flash of light in a forest shot. So it feels almost like the kind of the ghosts that were left there in the forest are taking over the video signal.
Caemeron Crain: Oh that’s great. Thanks.
Mason Nicoll: Yeah, yeah, so that was the foundational reasoning. But each season we kind of sometimes break it just because it feels right. Or there was something that was great in the music and we wanted to have it break for a moment and then cut back to that 4:3.
Rachel Brickel: I think part of it conceptually is just showing their mental state, you know, like where they were and where they are now and how it’s embedded, just like Mason was saying. So a lot of it has to do with that. Like how they became corrupted.
Caemeron Crain: Oh yeah, that’s interesting.
Anything you can tell me in terms of how you chose what shots to use? Was it just a matter of thinking these shots look cool, or was there more to it than that? And then the changes from season to season…
Mason Nicoll: It’s a little both. I’d like to say there’s more purpose to it, but sometimes it’s… I’m trying to remember like between 2 and 3. I mean, for what stays and what goes, a lot gets pulled even though on a first watch to somebody who might not be familiar, you don’t necessarily pick it out, but it is like everything that’s Season 1 related got pulled and replaced except for the Jackie shot, and there might have been one other.
Caemeron Crain: There’s a shot of Misty breaking the black box that’s still in there.
Mason Nicoll: Yeah, yeah, that one too. See, you even know better than I do on these things. So, it’s like we try to pull everything from Season 1. Except for those two. There might be another one. And the same with the update we were doing for Season 3. But, when the showrunners… obviously they have a great idea of what they want to tell story wise and what they want to give.
And sometimes there’s not a lot that we can say, because, you know, some of those same shots are going to end up in marketing, whether or not we would love those to only be in the the main title. That’s not always the case, but they usually give us a lot more than whatever… I think it ends up being like 60 to 70 shots, even though sometimes those shots are only like two or three frames long. And then we’ll pick ones that we feel like hopefully change the title enough to tell that story. And sometimes it’s broad, like from Season 1 to 2, it was like the winter was a key thing. And then there was some additional stuff like the playing cards and the symbol, which worked and was always there.
But there are new versions of that in connection with Lottie’s cult. So I remember we were kind of piggybacking like, if it’s the forest stuff, it’s winter, because obviously that’s what the whole season kind of revolved around. And then from there, we’ll work with the showrunners and they’ll say like, yeah, that shot’s great, but can we show less of this shot or distort it more?
So it really comes into a vibe, you know, creatively, does it feel like it fits? And in terms of what we’ve changed, does it feel like, oh, this is specific to Season 2 because there’s a lot of winter stuff and a lot of adult crazy body stuff in there versus what’s going to happen for what we’ve updated for Season 3.
Caemeron Crain: I was curious along those lines. Do you feel like… is there a concern coming from the showrunners and the writers about spoilers, or not giving too much away somehow? Do you feel like that’s increased at all?
Mason Nicoll: Oh yeah. Yeah, yeah, I think, I mean, I think they even kind of touched on this. I mean, it’s almost a bit of that the Lost syndrome where regardless of even if you’re not purposely trying to say, oh, there’s a tricky story underneath the story here or clues that you should be paying attention to, people, if they’re going to love the show, are going to spend time and potentially figure out who the Antler Queen is… so they definitely know that, because obviously going into Season 1 and then the response on that, they’ve, I think, pivoted in terms of some of the stuff they give us.
I think the one danger too is red herrings. I think there’s… I remember this from Season 1 or maybe Season 2… There’s some great shots from an episode that ended up getting severely cut down. And so we had some of those shots in there and pulled them at last minute.
So, and I know the showrunners also very consciously—they don’t want to, I guess, promise or maybe potentially piss off the audience for a shot in there that people might love and spend time investigating or figuring out how it connects to this story, when it might be just a whole episode that had to get cut out or chopped in half.
So it’s definitely a trick. I guess the benefit for us is, we’re just trying to make it look good. So a lot of times we’ll get fixated on a new shot we put on and how it works so well with the music. You know, it’s doing this on the beat and then does this, but then after everyone watches it, they’ll be like, oh no, we can’t show that because maybe it is promising a different storyline or something that’s not really there.
So it’s something that’s definitely thought about, and we’re conscious of, and I think even… I’m curious about your response with Season 2, there was more kind of David Lynch surrealism in some of those moments, and I know a lot of it were these kind of dream sequences with Misty.
So, I don’t know, because you see that in a title. Do you think that’s like a full storyline, or does it end up being this momentary kind of hallucinogenic scene that might not pertain, but it’s still worthwhile to have that visual be in a title? It’s that kind of balancing act of, you know, is it something great for the title, even if it might mislead people?
Caemeron Crain: I’m speaking for myself. I’ve never been bothered or overly disappointed. You know, of course, that shot of Misty, I mean, it seems like it’s Misty in the Red Room, right? It is very Lynchian. And yeah, as a fan of Twin Peaks that stood out like, oh, what’s going to be going on there?
There was another one, and maybe this is to the question you’re asking. There was one shot in the Season 2 credits, which ended up being Elijah Wood’s character, Walter, just like doing a facial. When it showed up in the credits, you’re like, what’s going on here in terms of this? Who is this? What is this mask? But when it came down to it and it ended up being something that just hardly mattered, it didn’t bother me.
Mason Nicoll: Yeah. I think that is the challenge with a show where you do have so much potential when it comes to the clues that are given out. And obviously a lot of that typically hinges in marketing. But then when it’s in the title before Season 1, I think it was a little bit more before the marketing.
Now we’re always kind of trailing the marketing because it starts before anyone sees the title. So it is that kind of interesting challenge, not only from the showrunners, in terms of how much do they want to show and tell and kind of build myth. And then we’re really just kind of responding to that.
And just does it fit in? Does it… kind of, is there one line that helps us sum up what’s the change tonally and visually from season to season?
Caemeron Crain: Would you have a line on that with regard to Season 3?
Mason Nicoll: I do, but I don’t… I think I would be hunted down if I gave it out, I don’t think I—
Caemeron Crain: I have seen the Season 3 credits, but… yeah, you don’t want to spoil the season, so I understand that.
Mason Nicoll: Yeah. But if you’ve seen it, I mean, it’s I think it’s there. There is, much like the change from 1 to 2 when it just comes to winter, there’s like a… there’s a… just a very overt, seasonal change. But there is another layer to that that I thought was interesting in terms of what we’ve done.
It might not be as kind of out there overt to most people, but I think it is noticeable to me. I mean, I think that’s the main thing, from just like, OK, I now know if I just see it really quickly, this is Season 3 because of X, Y, and Z.
Caemeron Crain: OK, but there’s something that you feel you need to withhold a little.
Mason Nicoll: A little bit.
Caemeron Crain: Along those lines, where you may also need to withhold in terms of responding to the question, I was kind of curious watching the Season 3 credits, and thinking back to Season 2, there’d been some casting announcements, and so it was no surprise to see the new characters showing up in the credits sequence. But, with Season 3, there have been a couple of casting announcements—I’m thinking of Hilary Swank and Joel McHale, maybe some others—but unless I missed it, they don’t seem to be in the sequence. Is there anything you can say about that?
Mason Nicoll: I think we’re just as surprised as you. It’s funny with casting, unless they’re in the title, we don’t even really know about it until the show, or until you probably know about too. Obviously, with Hilary Swank, I think it was the first trailer for the season, she was at the end. And I think we were surprised too, like, we didn’t put Hilary in the title. And I think some of that’s just like how much, with Laura Ambrose, she was pretty obviously, being adult Van, worthy of being in the title now. She’s part of it. So not necessarily knowing how Hilary mixes in with this, I’m just as surprised as you were.
With some of these, you know, with Laura Ambrose, that was one where obviously we got those shots and it was something where, OK, we need to add adult Van into the sequence. So we knew that was happening. I can’t remember how much it was before everybody else knew, because through the trades you might hear that Laura has been cast in Yellowjackets.
Caemeron Crain: It is true, it does feel like we sort of knew that Laura Ambrose was going to be adult Van. Like, everyone knew that. Whereas we do not know who Hilary Swank is playing yet. Or Joel McHale. So with both of them, there’s of course speculation in the fan community, like are they going to be older versions of people who are out in the wilderness or not?
Mason Nicoll: Yeah, I’m wondering too. Like I said, we don’t know. We don’t even know how those connect. But sometimes with the title, obviously we do the parallels between the teenage and the adult self. So obviously there would be that challenge. Like if we do that in the title, then people would know those connections.
And it might be something specific with the showrunners, like, oh, it’s going to be fun, if people don’t know—who are these people and how do they connect to the whole story?
Caemeron Crain: That’s part of why I asked. I was looking for clues and then that they’re not in there.
Mason Nicoll: Sometimes there could be things that we put in that we don’t really… I mean, a lot of the stuff we put in, we don’t know. Sometimes we just get a batch of images and we kind of get a general idea of what’s happening this season.
So that’s what we go off of. So there could be even clues in the title that we don’t know. That is just like a cool visual for us. But if you saw it and you start to know, you might draw those connections a lot quicker than we would in terms of who these characters are and how they connect to everybody else.
Caemeron Crain: Yeah, I’ll have to spend a bit more time on the Season 3 sequence and we’ll see.
Anything else that you want to say about the process, or your experience working on the Yellowjackets title?
Rachel Brickel: I mean, I think one of the things we could talk about was how it turned into, like, a really fun music video. Ultimately, it really had that nice, fun vibe. It was really about creating a vibe, you know? I think it’s super exciting. I think that’s what helps make it exciting every time you watch it.
And I think, when I was working on it, we ran it so many times watching and looking at it, but I hadn’t seen it on TV. We’re working on it and just over and over replaying, replaying, replaying, but when I had seen it on TV, I was like, whoa, this is actually pretty cool, you know? Once it’s on the TV, you’re like, this feels like a music video. And it really had a fun energy to it that I really didn’t notice. I actually saw it on the TV, and you’re so immersed when you’re working on it, it’s nice to take a step back and look at it and be like, oh, okay.
And also another thing is, we were really excited about the response to the title too from the fans. That’s not something that we expected initially, so that was something really exciting. I was thinking about today how when you’re making titles as an artist, you want to make something really cool and that looks good, but you also have to think about, like, how does the audience like it? Or how does the audience respond? And this is an example of a title where the audience really responded to it, and there’s something really rewarding in that. And fun. It helps every season keep that going, that relationship.
Mason Nicoll: Yeah. I think the music video is interesting. I think, Caemeron, was it your first article you mentioned Nine Inch Nails “Closer” and there’s almost that… I mean, I remember going way back to like 120 Minutes, which dates me even more, but I think there’s like that, you know, in connection with the found footage, and we knew musically that when Craig and Anna were putting this together this was going to be really interesting, like anytime we have a musical track that we get to cut to for a main title, it’s pretty special because it gets a little bit more rare with main titles these days. So I think that idea of like, it feels like it could be something that you see late night on 120 Minutes, like it’s almost like this weird, like, I kind of remember this music video, but I don’t, which was also this nice throwback to the era, which is an interesting that you mentioned, Rachel, but I know it was also something, Caemeron, which was there in the article, this kind of reference to catching a music video that was special, especially in that era. You know, there were so many filmmakers who were kind of just doing interesting things. I mean, that always happens. But it felt like in the mid-90s, there was just like a heyday of, you know, Spike Jonze and Mark Romanek stuff happening.
Caemeron Crain: Yeah, you’d have that experience where you just almost randomly stumble upon something that was just really weird and cool you never knew existed. And yeah, I do think that this feels like that. So, I love the work you’ve done here. Thanks so much for talking to me about it.
Mason Nicoll: Oh, yeah, no, it’s great to chat about, especially like four years later. We didn’t really get a chance to talk about when it first came out and over the seasons, it seems like people still keep watching, and not skipping it. So that’s always helpful.
Caemeron Crain: Well, then you change it. And so now there’s new stuff to analyze and pick apart and so on, right? So it’s fun. It’s great.
