Apple đã thay đổi toàn bộ cách tiếp thị sản phẩm: Sebastian Pardo chia sẻ về việc tạo hình thiết kế đồ họa cho The Brutalist

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In late October, A24 dropped a teaser for their highly anticipated The Brutalist, where glimpses of Brady Corbet’s epic flash by as credits and review pullquotes horizontally crawl across the screen like the VistaVision-format celluloid that ran through the camera to capture the picture. It’s a sharp piece of trailer design that formally evokes the experience of the film as much as it serves as a piece of marketing. The design of the scroll also summons the Bauhaus stylings that inspire the architecture of The Brutalist’s subject, László Tóth (Adrien Brody), highlighting the words on screen around evocations of the movement’s basic geometric forms. 

That scroll follows a template set by the opening credits of the film, carefully designed—down to the minutiae of the font—by Sebastian Pardo, one of the co-founders of the independent production company MEMORY. Pardo has made a name for himself not just working as a producer of low-budget cinema, but also as an astute craftsman of marketing materials for traditionally harder-to-sell films (like cutting the trailers for MEMORY’s own Rat Film or Fraud, or RaMell Ross’ documentary debut Hale County This Morning, This Evening) and creating carefully bespoke title sequences that are meant to go beyond merely presenting information, serving as a quietly essential aspect of the holistic design of a film. From his pre-MEMORY work at Roman Coppola’s slick ad and music video production house, The Directors Bureau, to creating freelance titles for the likes of Barry Jenkins, Sean Durkin, Antonio Campos, Gia Coppola and now Corbet, Pardo’s ethos is a testament to the importance of an oft-overlooked area of filmmaking. 

Ahead of the wide release of The Brutalist on December 20th, I sat down with Pardo over Zoom to talk titles, minor details of post-production and changes in film marketing over the last 10 years.

Filmmaker: When did you get started doing freelance title design?

Pardo: In college, I remember seeing people’s short films and they would choose the default Final Cut Pro font or something really low effort. And I’d be like, “Really? That’s all you’re gonna do? Let me help you.” A similar thing happened (at The Directors Bureau), where I’d hop on and help them with their titles. I had figured out this optical process—I’d bought my own Canon Scoopic. There was an animation stand at the office and I’d make these analog titles (with the Scoopic). That was really how I started doing them more professionally, even though I wasn’t getting paid. My stuff started to appear on music videos and fashion films. I had my own mini-label where I was making films and music, and doing design stuff there. Because I never studied design, I barely know how to use the programs. 

I worked on Palo Alto for four years (as a producer and line producer), and the guy who did the poster probably made more in four months. When we were making MEMORY, we were trying to come up with solutions to problems we saw in film. We wanted to make a brand first and be able to control the whole widget of the film. In doing that, you have to create marketing assets. You have to position your films in a high quality way, because you are making things that are different, and they need to feel premium rather than curios or failures, so I was heavily involved in the design of our films and marketing. 

Early on, we hired people that were our friends (while) being heavily involved in the design. By the time that we were really fully running and putting on our own events, we had a lot of other filmmaker friends that had a similar thing happening go, “Hey, that stuff you’re doing with MEMORY is cool. Can you do it for us?” It just so happened that one of those was Moonlight. Moonlight won best picture, then they got the team back together for (If) Beale Street (Could Talk), so all of a sudden I was accumulating big credits while still producing films with MEMORY. I would fit these in while still doing everything else, and that’s when I got to the level of doing a lot of Sundance (films). We got into a cycle where I was producing films in the summer during the slow periods, then during the busy periods doing design stuff. Nurturing those relationships, getting repeat business and word-of-mouth, I kept getting offered amazing things. I’ve been very fortunate. Also, because of MEMORY I was offered designing or branding for other film companies. Maybe one of the more valuable parts of MEMORY was the branding and marketing aspect. 

Filmmaker: When you and Riel founded MEMORY in 2014, A24 was only a year or two old, and they’ve come to define a certain “cool” aspect of film marketing. How much has the advertising for films changed in that 10 years?

Pardo: 10 years ago, movies would get picked up out of Sundance by NEON or Orchard—big enough reputable companies (that) would do proper marketing. Especially back then, it was easy to tell what was done at a high, professional level and what was more amateur. You could see the marketing spend just by looking at the materials a film had. If you didn’t get one of those big distributors, you were left on the sidelines with a smaller distributor who would maybe spend $1,000 or $2,000 on the poster, and it was very rushed and wasn’t necessarily given much care. For us, if we didn’t do the design, somebody who didn’t really get the movie would, and the film would then look cheap. 

Companies like Apple changed the whole landscape of how you market a product. Now, even your eyeglasses or whatever, you care about the packaging, you care about how you buy them at a store. Those are all things Apple did. I think A24 did re-emphasize the kind of care you have to put into your marketing materials to market to, at least, a certain kind of audience. It was there in little pieces, but it wasn’t part of the brand of the company. I remember in 2014 being a big Neil Kellerhouse fan and following what movies he worked on.

Criterion Collection was actually the place (in 2014) that had the most similarities to A24, in that they really considered designs for their Blu-rays, thoughtful marketing for these old films that gave them a new context. If anything, that’s a way to think about A24: they made Criterion for current-day film releases. The industry has changed so much that now it just seems like there’s fewer players in the game, fewer sustainable models. A24’s gotten more concise at doing A24 things. If you’re not doing an A24 film, maybe you’re doing a Marvel film, and if you’re not doing a Marvel film you’re doing more of an Oscar film. So, in the consolidation of the industry at-large, there’s aesthetic monopolies on each lane. 

Filmmaker: Do you find yourself working with filmmakers that care about those kinds of details a lot? Brady Corbet, for example, is very technically minded, very aesthetically proficient. It seems to me that something as small as title design would be in the minutiae that he is focusing on as well. 

Pardo: Absolutely. I think that’s primarily why I get that call. If they were satisfied with just the editor or a big company doing it, they wouldn’t call me. Because I have a background in filmmaking and producing, not only do I understand the technical aspects and how it all fits together, but I also start from the premise of the film. It very much comes from trying to pull out the themes and motifs of the film and embed them in the design. Directors like having that conversation, and being reminded that is a way to think about their own work and where the decision tree should flow from. 

Brady’s incredibly technically detailed, observant, has his fingers in all the pots, and at the same time gives a huge amount of trust to his collaborators. He’s really been great to work with in that sense. People go, “Oh how did you get the idea for the opening credits?” You don’t really get to have those decisions; those come from the filmmaker, and only because he gave oxygen to the flame of what can be in the front could we do something really great. We actually did the lateral scrawl in the initial sales trailer for the film before the film was financed. Brady had shot some stuff as a camera test and brought me in to help with this sales pitch. We wanted to do something left-to-right. Then COVID happened, the cast changed a million times over—I almost forgot about the project.

Brady hit me up four or five years later and said, “I want to do something like the sales trailer. It should open like that.” He told me the idea for the opening and I sent an initial response saying, “You should never use these famous Bauhaus fonts, they’re too cliche.” Once I started really getting into the design I went down to the library and pulled out every book they had on Bauhaus. I remember printing out a lot of different things, putting them up on my board and reading some of their manifestos. The film takes place more in the 40s and 50s, which is a little bit of a different style, and Brutalism itself grows out of that and isn’t actually Bauhaus, more an extension of its way of thinking. It was a desire to synthesize these kinds of constructivist designs, still make it feel like part of the film but also feel fresh. It’s its own thing.

 A lot of research went into it and a lot of different looks. There was something that was even more intricate, and Brady was like “You know what? This is gonna distract from the beginning. Let’s dial it down.” We totally could’ve gotten lost in the sauce and done some amazing, one-off design, but it would’ve overwhelmed. Some of the breakthroughs we had in the beginning changed how we thought about later credits in the movie—that diagonal crawl at the end grew out of that. At the 11th hour, the Part 1 and Part 2 cards were totally redesigned. I think Brady was watching test screenings, ready to go to print for the 70mm, and said “I think I want to do something a little different here.” At the end, they were figuring out a lot of the technical issues about printing to film, so we had extra time to live with it. The job was maybe not fully 18 months, but more than a year. Obviously, I was not designing every day, but just having that time allowed us to make tweaks at the end. 

In general, it’s getting to the point where I’ve been working with people a couple times, so now people will bring me into the conversation earlier. It used to the edit was locked, they had a temp (title), and said, “What can you fit in this slot?” And you just go “Well, here’s a different font.”” Now, seeing it before the clay has dried, sometimes I get to have a little more say about “What if we try this? What if the edit looked like that?” That’s been a fun wrinkle to add. Iron Claw, there was a totally different edit at the start of the movie, so we had very different titles, then the edit changed, and it was a very natural back and forth. I think in general filmmakers that I work with are looking for that feeling. They want to have a collaboration and something that feels really embedded to the film. That’s part of your job as a designer: not just be a font chooser, but a continuation of the whole filmmaking process. 

Filmmaker: To come back to The Brutalist’s scroll, I have to ask: is the horizontal motion meant to mimic the VistaVision it was shot on?

Pardo: That’s more of a Brady question. By virtue of me not being on set, I never made that connection, but that could very well be something Brady was thinking about. The VistaVision logo that shows up at the beginning is something that we designed as well. It’s a combination of a logo, a pre-roll, and an ad, combining the colors and the movement from that. I’m trying to get it to be used on other films, I feel like it’s for more than just that one movie. 

Filmmaker: You use a similar scroll in the trailer for The Brutalist as well. It’s evocative of what the product actually is, and I feel like that is not always the case. And using the same kind of scroll has a similar effect in the trailer as it does in the film. 

Pardo: A24 was very generous to invite me to that process, and I was happy to contribute and create a bespoke design for the trailer. Again, Brady was very involved and had a vision for that. I’m not as clear as to how that side of it works, but I know that obviously the end result is, in some ways, meant to mimic the movie. 

Filmmaker: You cut trailers for the films you produce, and also you’ve done a little freelance work there. What’s your ethos with those?

Pardo: We usually get called in to do trailers when it’s not an easy thing to market because it’s not “Here’s a story. There’s a beginning, middle, and end. Here’s a lesson.” Our movies are often more tonal or cerebral, or an essay film— a very difficult thing to unpack in two minutes, right? So, we often focus on the power of images, and the power of juxtaposition of images. A lot of my design philosophy, and maybe just larger presentation philosophy, is, how can you create a kind of mental dissonance? In the same way that two different notes can be harmonious, how can you create competing images or competing design languages that maybe don’t feel like they belong together, but in bringing them together you create something interesting? Cinema can do things a book can’t do, that a sculpture can’t do. (Cinema is) images in time with sound. We can find an image that can kind of be a synecdoche, that can hold power and evoke something for the whole movie. Or two images against each other—Rat Film might have Google Maps against an exterminator, and you might go “How’s that the same movie?” 

The first time we really got called in to do that was for Hale County (This Morning, This Evening), a very challenging movie to market. Again, you’re collaborating with the director, and the director has his own particular set of rules about how he constructed the film, and that really helped inform how we could make the trailer. If the trailer could cohere to those rules, then it will represent the film. That’s what you’re saying about The Brutalist teaser: It coheres to the same rules as the film, therefore it’s a good representation of the film. I think also with MEMORY, that’s why we wanted to be so involved with that process, because it’s so delicate. If you have somebody who doesn’t understand the film or doesn’t have the space to really get that deep in it, they might not always put the best thing forward to represent the film. If you don’t really get it, you’re going to have a hard time communicating to other people who might really get it.