Responses by Karin Fong, director/designer, Imaginary Forces
Background: Supervillain: The Making of Tekashi 6ix9ine is a Showtime docuseries about Tekashi 6ix9ine, a controversial rapper who rose to fame through social media. The series explores the concept of manufactured celebrities and how societal forces enable this type of toxic fame. The main titles play off of this concept by presenting Tekashi being produced in a lab. The opener is also a prologue to the interstitials we created for each episode. Breaking down the “elements” of a supervillain, the interstitials are a key narrative device interwoven throughout the documentary, which director Karam Gill incorporated to extend the lab metaphor.
Reasoning: The opening titles tease out the creation of Tekashi in abstract ways and tee up the interstitials, which show him being operated on a table. The titles provide the bigger context of that overhead POV. Viewers never actually see Tekashi in the opening, just the Frankenstein-like creation of him in abstract ways: bubbling test tubes, injecting gelatin heads with dye and filling molds of body parts with colors that reflect Tekashi’s signature rainbow motif.
Challenges: COVID production challenges aside, it was merging our digital and analog effects into a seamless visual language moving from the titles to the interstitial content. Some of the action figures were 3-D printed and filmed, while others only exist as CG models. We matched them all up as if captured completely in-camera.
Favorite details: This is about the making of a monster and Karam encouraged us to get dark with it, so I’m proud of the moments that make you recoil just a bit—like the brain being pierced with wires. Our prop master spent a lot of time researching and sourcing materials: gummy organs, chocolate mold heads and some chemistry experiments. The day we found a stuffed rat for the IV bag shot was a small victory. All of these details helped make things look and feel a bit off.
Visual influences: Karam wanted a sleek, modern aesthetic to contrast with the grittiness of his documentary. So, we used clean visuals with lots of white and steel for a scientific and controlled take. I looked at cosmetic ads because they render bottles, pigments and glass with such perfection. Shooting on a lightbox enhanced that idea, and created a place where we could bring in pop culture references using photos and film clips. Gundam model kits inspired the action figure idea, and the titles functioned to frame up that narrative.
Anything new: We learned just how much collaboration can be done with a team working remotely during a pandemic! But we were already in lab gear, so visors, masks and gloves fit right in. Creatively, the project reinforced how satisfying it is to take a design metaphor beyond the opening sequence and cover the entire show arc. Karam made a gutsy move to emphasize the themes of Supervillain in a stylized way, and I hope it will inspire other filmmakers to follow suit!
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