The Main on End title sequence of 30 Days of Night is a literal and metaphorical exploration of the themes within the movie – a thriller with horror elements about an isolated town in Alaska where the sun sets and doesn't rise again for thirty consecutive days each year. During one of these periods of total darkness, vampires on a path of destruction ravaged the town.

The audience is confronted with a sequence of highly disquieting images that cross-dissolve or fade to black. There are details of torn and tainted photographs, mysterious northern lights, shadows, a bloody tooth embedded in a thick layer of ice and references to the Alaskan wintercape. Brian Reitzell's haunting score greatly enhances the discomforting atmosphere.

Title designer Nic Benns talks in great detail about the production process of the title sequence: “The burned photos and eerie shattered artifacts slowly reveal the untold horrors the town faced. I wanted to expand the story of the towns people a little - those that survived, others that were the faces behind distant screams in streets, heard throughout the film. I also wanted to hint that one of them -the boy- could be a vampire.”

Nic Benns: “The director David Slade asked us to pitch on this. I usually create a book - love doing boards - to show the director/producer of the film. We explored several directions through storyboards and animated tests before settling on a sequence that worked as a kind of epilogue. The film is the story of an Alaskan town, Barrow, that is plagued by vampires when the sun sets for a month each year.”

“In production, I built miniature film sets, like details of the houses out of driftwood, soiled carpet, burned wallpaper, anything I could find in skips or on the streets of Soho in London. We asked for photos of cast and family and Sony supplied some, but we sourced most of the pictures or shot our own to look like the town inhabitants. I then filmed plates of these elements along with organic materials to create the vignettes. The time-lapse ice was real but I found treacle to be quite good blood, along with washing powder mixed with course sea salt for snow. Our meeting room was a mess.”

“We had two weeks to turn the entire sequence around after storyboards so there was a lot of napping under desks during the day and conference calls at 4 am – with Sony being in LA and the post house in New Zealand. Working on the titles through the night really helped produce a more unsettling sequence.”

“For the opening of the film, Miki Kato created a view of the town that looks a little like a map - a 'schematic' of where the action is about to take place.”

Momoco is a "multi-disciplinary design and live action studio" in London specializing in title sequences for film and television, commercials and music videos.

Momoco UK was founded by Nic Benns and Miki Kato. Creative director Nic Benns graduated from Cambridge University and moved to the US to study film at Cal Arts, where he met Kato. Kato came from Japan to attend Cal Arts to study an MFA in Graphic Design.

Momoco has been designing title sequence since 1996, starting off in L.A. at Imaginary Forces and yU+co, before setting up Momoco in L.A. and London in 1999. Sister company Momoco L.A. (Harold de Jesus and Marcel Valcarce) rebranded in 2005 to become inMotion Studios.

Momoco wrote, produced and directed the short science fiction movie, Copelia, which was released in 2010. The company is currently developing a feature film project.

more about Momoco

Full credits

Title Director, Designer and Editor
Nic Benns

Film director
David Slade

Music
Brian Reitzell

Links

comment on this title

Your comment

All fields are required. Your email address is used for verification only (we won't spam you).

name:
email:
message:
code:	reload (case sensitive)