How To Address A Letter With A Title

the netflix horror-mystery show stranger thingshas been praised for its pitch-perfect homage to the 1980s, and that includes its greatopening credits sequence. it plays for almost a full minute before everyepisode, but it looks so good i never skipped over it. watching it made me wonder — what does ittake to make something like this?

How To Address A Letter With A Title, so i called up michelle dougherty. she’s a creative director at imaginary forces,the studio that made the title sequence. "you want it to feel, original, you want itto feel like that title sequence couldn't work in front of another show."

you may not have heard of imaginary forces,but you’ve probably seen their work. they’re responsible for the opening creditsto mad men, boardwalk empire, chuck, the pacific, jessica jones, late night with seth myers— i could go on, it’s a long list. when they first got on the phone with strangerthings showrunners matt and ross duffer, they knew they wanted to go for a style similarto what the studio r/greenberg associates did in the '70s and '80s with alien, the deadzone, and altered states. "the duffers had sent us these paperback books,probably ones that they read as kids. we looked at the typography on those and,you know, they may range, right? but they're all kind of in the same vein ofpopular typefaces of the '80s."

she sent me their early drafts of the titlesequence, and you can clearly see the influence of those book covers. the duffer brothers picked this one, which,eventually, became this. let’s talk about the typeface. it’s called itc benguiat, and it was madein 1978 by a jazz percussionist-turned designer named ed benguiat. here it is on the “choose your own adventure”book series from the '80s and '90s. and on the smiths’ 1987 album “strangeways,here we come.” it’s also been the font of paramount’sfbi piracy warning since 1995.

i often think of the sequence as a celebrationof that typeface in a way, because you really get to see the most beautiful parts of it. in the old days before animation software,title sequences were shot “optically” — which is just another way of saying theywere made manually, frame-by-frame, with a projector and a camera. for stranger things, the title designers wantedto replicate that gritty look; they wanted to make it look like there were imperfectionsin the image. so to do that, they rigged up these things:they call them kodaliths, it's basically an old film format that produces a reallyhigh contrast image.

and they filmed what it looked like when lightshined through those film letters. "we referenced some of those inconsistencies,what you call mistakes. we wanted it to have this tactile feel … and wewanted it to feel organic and of the time period." they then used those animate the titles digitally. that’s why you see subtle flickering andshaking in the text. the end result is an eerie mix of digitaland physical mediums — and with this great track from the synth band survive, it setsthe tone for one of this summer’s biggest tv hits.