HBO and Sky TV asked Imaginary Forces for the opening title sequence of War, a legal drama from the creator of Lupin and Hijack about two rival London law firms. Creative director Ronnie Koff and team did it without a lawyer, a courtroom, or a gavel.
Instead: abstract expressionism, two opposing forms, paint.
“We wanted the sequence to feel like conflict distilled to its most elemental form. Instead of showing lawyers, courtrooms or traditional imagery from the legal world, we wanted to visualize what happens when two opposing forces come up against one another.”
The breakthrough was behaviour, not design
This is the part worth taking away, and Koff is explicit about it. Abstraction alone did not work — the sequence needed a clear sense of confrontation, and they got there by stopping thinking about composition and starting to think about conduct:
“We started thinking about the two sides almost like two boxers in a ring. One advances, the other responds. They collide, separate and come back at each other. Once we started giving the paint that kind of intention, the abstraction suddenly had a story.”
Forms collide, fracture, bleed and overlap; compositions shift between order and disorder; control gives way to chaos and then reorganises and starts again.
The general lesson is a good one for anyone working abstractly to a brief. Abstraction without a behavioural model is decoration — it can be beautiful and it carries no argument. Give the elements intention and consequence, even a crude one borrowed from somewhere completely unrelated like boxing, and the same marks start reading as narrative. The brief asked for conflict; a rule about how two things take turns advancing delivers conflict more reliably than any amount of choosing the right red.
Koff’s own summary of why the medium suits the subject:
“There’s something beautiful about abstract expressionism because you can feel aggression, tension and emotion without being told exactly what you’re looking at. That felt like the right language for War. The title sequence isn’t illustrating the conflict — it becomes the conflict.”
The pipeline, which is unusually worth copying
Three stages, three tools, each doing one job:
Procreate with an Apple Pencil on iPad for the hand-painted animation. Chosen for being “very direct and gestural” — the movement was hand-painted, with each gesture choreographed as a reaction to the other form. An iPad is not where you would expect a broadcast title sequence to begin, and that is the point: for gestural mark-making, the directness of a pencil on glass beats anything with a mouse in it.
Krita to introduce “the richer, textured paint quality we were after.” A free, open-source painting application, in a professional title pipeline, between two commercial tools — used specifically for its paint texture.
Cinema 4D, rendered with Redshift, for the final stage: placing the artwork onto canvas and lighting it so the surface, texture and depth of the paint read properly.
That last step is the one that makes the whole thing work and the one most people would skip. The sequence is digital throughout, and the stated goal was for it to feel “tactile, imperfect and genuinely painted.” You do not get that by adding a paper texture in post. You get it by treating the painting as a physical object in a 3D scene — a canvas with real surface relief, lit from a direction, so that the paint has thickness and catches light at its edges.
They also “built up layers of texture and imperfection to make the imagery feel less digital and more physical” before the 3D stage. Imperfection as a deliberate, layered pass rather than an accident.
Credits
Creative director Ronnie Koff; art director Henry Chang; designer Kathy Liang; painter/animator Drew Tyndell; editor Lexi Gunvaldson; producer Christina Hwang; executive producer Renee Robson.
Worth noting the job title “painter/animator” exists on this credit list at all. It is the right description of the work and not one you see often.