Responses by Nic Benns, director and cofounder, MOMOCO.
Background: The Girl Before, a TV adaptation of a novel by author J.P. Delaney, follows Jane, a woman obsessed with a contemporary, minimalist house and discovers that Emma, the house’s previous tenant who bears an uncanny resemblance to her, met with a tragic end. The drama plays out over two timelines that interweave as their fates merge.
This opening title sequence sets the stage of the story: an architect’s house occupied by two figures, one past, one present, one that was killed and the other discovering her fate. The development of the shots, which become more angled, abstract and frenetic, also references the nature of the drama, hinting to viewers that this will be a suspenseful, twisting journey.
I treat each title sequence as though it’s a moving book cover: it should sum up the experience, introduce the audience to the story’s world and sometimes inform them of a backstory. This opening does all of these obliquely, inviting the audience to discover the connections.
Design thinking: The Girl Before feels like a contemporary ghost story, so I chose to show Jane and Emma occupying the same space as shadows and reflections. They pass each other, mirroring each other’s actions and occasionally almost touching, which reflects their relationship across time. It’s as if the walls have captured and absorbed their everyday domestic moments and now replay them.
The architecture itself becomes mirrored and Rorschach-like, echoing the show’s psychological elements. I angled the sequence into a film noir aesthetic and focused on certain story elements, like the tulips, stairs, bathroom mirror and Acer tree—all clues for an audience who loves a mystery.
Challenges: The chosen direction was to be more photorealistic. We spent a lot of time creating details and materials that added greatly to the 4K rendering time. We would then cut from a CG building to the real thing, so it needed to be physically accurate and believable not to jar the audience. All this was accomplished working with two CG artists while working remotely in lockdown.
While I was on board to create a believable building, I felt the sequence should be more abstract, even impressionistic and nightmarish. We developed other looks alongside the photorealistic version for the sequence: a more stylized 3-D look using gradients, another that was high contrast. As we spent time working on these, we showed the producers a version that just used two 3-D materials to focus more on the story being told. We would have spent many more weeks attempting to create a building identical to reality when this looked more stylish and surreal. This middle ground allowed interplay with light and shadow, focusing on the stark character of the building. Then, the process was less about 3-D detail and more about storytelling and design, choreographing light and shadow to reveal and conceal while remaining well-composed and designing the shots to house all the credits.
Visual influences: The use of shadows in film noir cinema like The Third Man. I’ve used silhouettes in many character-driven main titles such as Luther and the upcoming Slow Horses, but here, they’re playing off the idea of what is real, what is a reflection and what is shadow.
One of the early storyboards was fueled by MC Escher, deconstructing the space to make the building more puzzle-like with impossible perspectives that evolve into a labyrinth. The stairs are integral to the story: they lend themselves to Escher’s infinite lop when mirrored. Being concrete and effectively floating off the walls, the steps look—and are—lethal. Inspired by Escher at the concept stage, I explored turning the environment into a dialogue of light and shadow and contrasting, colliding images, some becoming so kaleidoscopic that they become disorientating geometric patterns.
The architectural schematic world would simplify into geometric grids before folding into constantly growing line drawings of shifting perspectives. The structures slide or bleed into open story images of Jane’s daily routine. The Escher-like compositions create multiple perspectives of the same character as if she has echoed across the space while the type is entangled in the evolving geometry. Stairs dilate like an iris, exposing the main title.
Time constraints: So much time was spent conceptualizing that the production time was compressed to a few weeks, among other projects we worked on during lockdown. By the time we got to production, the house wasn’t available to shoot in.
In a single day, we set the camera into a low-res model and output about a hundred possible shots for composition and framing. This gave an immediate sense of the space and engendered story ideas and questions. About half of those were selected as the light-and-shadow design brought more opportunities; some that were weaker compositionally suddenly became much more attractive when they were mirrored. As our process needed to be very fast, we mapped out the arc and were able to present several different style directions.
Being more impressionistic rather than photorealistic meant we could show edits and options quickly throughout the process. We also quickly presented different lighting concepts, such as having the lights become more strobic towards the end with the shadow of Emma dancing wildly or freaking out.
Ultimately, showing more options and needing to present to lots of voices often means simplification and achieving a different result.
Divergent paths: In a parallel dimension, the result could have been much different. After reading the script, I had produced a few different directions, exploring routes that were more abstract and prismatic. One told the story through reflections in the city. Another peeled through layers of the house to discover levels of time—stains that would seep through the walls, becoming holes into other rooms and exposing red-tinted images of the past.
Initially, the chosen concept was called “Cracks” that I’d pitched on a call. As the camera would explore the house in “Cracks,” fine cracks would etch across shifting architecture, the fissures leading viewers through the house that was simultaneously healing up as if concealing. Then, the cracks would form the silhouette of the title: The Girl Before. We eventually lost the cracks entirely through conference calls and storyboarding as it was deemed too spooky and might misdirect the audience or raise different expectations.
If I were to start over, I’d probably go with something more nightmarish that began as something grounded to draw the audience in and quickly became more surreal. The camera might be much more fluid and flow through the house, losing the sense of its anchor until we end up tumbling through space, walls becoming floors and light contracting. We could even push the architecture around, watch it slide like a constant puzzle and develop the Rorschach mirroring further—even going kaleidoscopic and tripping out of depth with optical illusions and tricks of light.
The typography also became simplified, which works for the current story. I’d revert it to type that would become more schematic during design. The credits’ letters could extend outwards, their lines locking into each other and becoming little cages.
I’d also reinstate the cracks, initially appearing out of focus in the background before they slowly grow and form a shape, etching an eye, flowers and a hand reaching out for help. In the story, a character is said to be killed by a falling wall. The cracks in the sequence could both represent physical and psychological cracks, growing and healing.
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