Responses by Adrian Yu, director/creative director, yU+co
Background: “Mother Box Origins” is a standalone two-minute teaser film that expands the world that fans are about to experience in Zack Snyder’s Justice League. Using the film’s idea of Mother Boxes, or mythical change machines, we created detailed bas-reliefs of each hero’s origin stories, integrating references to Zack’s creative process and to cameos in the film. We aimed to tease diehard fans with an Easter egg hunt to drive more anticipation for the feature film.
Reasoning: The concept came from a long creative relationship with Zack, understanding his love for religious and mythological iconography and anachronistic juxtapositions of sight and sound. We had pitched to him the idea of depicting each hero’s origin stories on the shapeshifting Mother Boxes because they were central to the film. Zack loved the idea so much that he also gave us sketches that referenced his years of conceptualizing his DC cinematic universe. The end product became a wholly one-of-a-kind film that not only expanded the film’s lore, but also shared a personal piece of Zack himself.
Challenges: Designing the reliefs, with all their fine details. We’d experimented with several approaches and art styles, from Greek to Art Deco. Our stroke of luck was bringing in ZBrush artist Farzad Maleki to craft each relief based on Zack’s sketches. We needed to convey both emotion and narrative in each composition so that our camera could fluidly move from one object to the next—while also being able to resolve into a wide shot that shows a fully realized bas-relief.
Favorite details: The unexpected level of detail that fans have dissected our work with to look for connections to the comics or other films in the series, even pointing out details that we hadn’t thought of. For example in our Cyborg relief, fans immediately recognized the Vitruvian Man reference, but also saw a resemblance to a scene in Justice League Dark: Apokolips War where Cyborg is splayed out in pieces like our relief. Although we didn’t intend to reference that film, it was exciting to see how our hard work both resonated with fans and stayed true to the decades-long canon of DC history.
Visual influences: We wanted to tie each hero back to a mythological figure, something that DC Comics frequently did with their characters. We also went back to Greek, Nordic, and even Art Deco bas-reliefs to pull references on composition and the hierarchy of figure placement. Cyborg was tied to the Vitruvian Man and Hephaestus; Batman was tied to St. Sebastian and Hades; The Flash was tied to Hermes, Superman was tied to Assumption of the Virgin Mary and Zeus; Aquaman was tied to Poseidon and Wonder Woman was tied to The Birth of Venus and Artemis.
Specific demands: Our collaboration with Zack has been very easy with the trust we’ve built with him. There weren’t any particular demands, and we had a lot of creative freedom to execute something that pushes the envelope. But what might’ve been the most Hail Mary creative decision was the music choice. We wanted to try something special, so the first choice was Tom Waits’ “Time.” We loved his gravely voice and simple instrumentation, but the real kicker was how well the lyrics lined up to the visuals. We presented it to Zack and he immediately loved it—it really took the sequence from 80 percent to 100 percent in depth and emotion.
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