http://www.artofthetitle.com/title/true-detective/
Creative Director PATRICK CLAIR details the creation of the title sequence for us.
PC: The project was produced by the wonderful and talented Jennifer Sofio Hall at Elastic and directed by myself through our studio Antibody. The team at Antibody in Sydney, led by Senior Designer Raoul Marks and with compositing and animation support from the good folk at Breeder, based in Brisbane, completed the design and animation phase. It was a truly transnational production.
When we were initially briefed, Nic Pizzolatta, the showrunner, and Cary Fukunaga, the director, spoke a lot about how the landscape and setting of the show revealed the characters and reflected their internal struggles. The show is set in Louisiana in the ÔÇÖ90s, with a strong presence of the petrochemical infrastructure and the pollution of the physical landscape. We read scripts for the first three episodes before even considering the visual execution. Story is always the most fundamental part of our design process, so it was great getting a good understanding of the writing before we began to explore visual ideas.
Visually, we were inspired by photographic double exposures. Fragmented portraits, created by using human figures as windows into partial landscapes, served as a great way to show characters that are marginalised or internally divided. It made sense for the titles to feature portraits of the lead characters built out the place they lived. This became a graphic way of doing what the show does in the drama: reveal character through location.