The Dark Crystal: Age of Resistance - Prologue - Part One
Work
Part One
I was tasked to create and produce the opening sequence for Netflix’s original series The Dark Crystal: Age of Resistance, designing a visual narrative that helps the viewers understand the story of the Dark Crystal.
My team worked on the process from concept to final shots: designed styleframes and developed assets for the prologue, then created and delivered the final shots. The two-minute prologue introduced the viewers to the world of Thra and its inhabitants, established the main characters and their relationships in a series of shots and placed them on a three-dimensional map of Thra.
The Dark Crystal: Age of Resistance is a prequel to the 1982 classic puppet-animated film, The Dark Crystal, and like the cult original, it is puppet-animated and filmed on tangible sets. Some CGI and VFX were added to support the performances of the puppeteers and voice artists, as unobtrusively as possible. Over 70 different species were created for the series, 83 puppeteers & 59 voice artists bringing the creatures to life. In total, more than 2,500 people worked on the ten episodes.
I led the team working on the two-minute prologue introducing the world of Thra and its creatures, and the complex web of their relationships. The reason we needed CG was to fill some narrative gaps that were difficult to achieve using puppets. Working from the script, we had to find visual elements to tell the story.
Visual Narrative Development
The main challenge for us in the prologue was to create visually stunning images that tell a very complex story, whilst maintaining as much fidelity to the world of the original film as possible. We explored ways to get the message through, and went through a really exciting creative process of establishing a look for the prologue and exploring our options to get the audience on board.
Director: Louis Leterrier
Executive Producer: Lisa Henson and Halle Stanford
Production Companies: Netflix, The Jim Henson Company
Distributor: Netflix
Producer: Ritamarie Peruggi
Visual Effects Supervisor: Sean Matthiesen
Visual Effects Producer: Alex Reinach
Lunarstorm Studio
Peter Eszenyi, Roland Lukacsi, Ferdinando Spagnolo