Patrick Clair, “Westworld” title designer is enjoying the fun challenge of designing the ever-advancing opening sequence for Lisa Joy and Jonathan Nolan’s sci-fi series. However, he knows that the “Westworld” fanbase is excited to see what new themes will appear with the new season.
Clair in a telephonic interview said, “It’s a big deal for us to take 90 seconds of the audience’s time at the start of each episode.”
He added, “We try not to get too concerned about the details of the plot. [We’re] more concerned about what’s bubbling down beneath. That way it gets more interesting as the season goes on.”
Clair was also selected as one of the nominees for Emmy for his amazing title design for “Westworld” season 3. The designer spoke regarding the new thematic elements in the opening credits for the 3rd season.
“My goal as a title designer is to try and make a sequence that people don’t feel like skipping”.
He added, “If you’re wrestling with the same themes that the characters are wrestling with, then you can draw all sorts of meanings from what you’re seeing. And that’s what makes it interesting, right? You’re trying to guess, ‘Well where are they leading me?'”
To date, Clair has designed the lead titles for Westworld’s season 3. Clair begins with the process only when the scripts are completed. And after Joy and Nolan get done with the main script of the season.
“And I don’t necessarily mean what the plot points are, but it’s more what is going on fundamentally at the heart of the show,” Clair said. “What themes are they tackling and, most importantly, what are the journeys of the key characters?”
Clair highlighted the relationship Maeve and her daughter shared in the second season. Therefore, a woman holding a child was in the main title of the second season.
“Then we got to season three, and based on these conversations with Jonah [Nolan] is seems to me that it was about people trying to strike out and find their freedom,” Clair said. “[Trying] to find their voice and come to understand themselves, and also deal with this push and pull between companionship and competition.”
“[They’re] thinking that they’re reaching out to find a companion,” he said. “And just as they get there, they break through the surface and the illusion is destroyed. They realize that not only were they alone, but that in ascending to this new plane they’re leaving a part of themselves behind.”
Clair also worked on the theme and referred to it as “a riff on the Icarus myth.”
Icarus is a Greek Mythology’s idol. Daedalus, Icarus’s father made him a pair of wings and feathers. This allowed him to break open the prison. Also, Daedalus warned Icarus that he shouldn’t fly too high. Because it would melt away the wings made up of wax. But he didn’t listen to his father and started flying really high. Due to this, the wax melted and he lost his wings. He then drowned after falling into the sea.
Clair has designed, “an eagle taking flight in this bizarre, jet-powered wind tunnel” in the third season.
“Ultimately it flies too close to the sun, so to speak,” Clair said. “It gets torn apart as it’s soaring through.”
According to Clair, the bird should be in the exact abstract like the buffalo or horse. He wanted it to fly in the assumed wind tunnel. rather Clair kept a jet-engine on the face of the bird.
“And of course, that jet turbine is going to then destroy the thing in the wind tunnel,” Clair said. “That seemed to have the very Westworld-feeling loop of the perversity of technology and fate and contradictions.”
In season 3, Dolores and Caleb fight against the company that makes use of Rehoboam (an AI system) to control every life on the Earth.
“We got to take this cool, very alien thing — the spherical AI that’s utterly inhuman — and then weave that in with a very human symbol of the dandelion,” Clair said. “And this idea of our fates being as random as dandelion petals blowing in the breeze and scattering in the winds. Those very petals of the dandelions coalesce into the blinking lights of Rehoboam.”
Clair has partnered with Dr. Pinar Yanardag Delul (an AI researcher) for the AI algorithm
“The algorithm can then basically spit out its dream-like, surreal impressions of what the Westworld park looks like,” Clair said. “And you get these amazing, surreal results of distorted, faces, shapes that in one moment they look like a huge rocky outcrop from Monument Valley but then the next moment you realized it was the leg of a host in the saloon.”
