Kyle Cooper

Kyle Cooper has directed over 150 film title sequences, and has been credited with
"almost single-handedly revitalizing the main-title sequence as an art form". He is the
founder of two internationally recognized film design companies, Imaginary Forces and
Prologue Films. Cooper earned a M.F.A. in Graphic Design from the Yale School of
Art, where he studied independently with Paul Rand. Cooper is a member of the
Alliance Graphique Internationale and holds the honorary title of Royal Designer for
Industry from the Royal Society of Arts in London.

"Do you want to see my black widows?" Kyle Cooper asks as he walks through his
studio - past tanks holding an octopus and two Burmese pythons - to a padlocked shed
beside his house. Inside sits a tiny aquarium filled with more than 50 spiders. It feels
like the set of Fear Factor. But these are Cooper's pets - and the stars of his latest two-
minute masterpiece, the opening credits for Spider-Man 2, due in theaters June 30. "I
caught the first black widow in my library," he says, pointing to the bloated queen in the
corner. "I've been studying it and its offspring to photograph and model ever since."

Cooper, 41, specializes in crafting title sequences - the short introductions and closings
to films, videogames, and television shows that list the names of the cast and crew
involved in the production. In this boutique industry, Cooper is king. He has designed
the lead-ins to 150 features - including Donnie Brasco, the 1996 remake of The Island
of Dr. Moreau, Mission: Impossible, Spider-Man, Sphere, Spawn, Twister, and Flubber.
The movies themselves may not be cinematic classics, but Cooper's credits - which
operate as minifilms in their own right - consistently stun and entertain audiences. For
this spring's Dawn of the Dead, he even used real human blood. Critic Elvis Mitchell, in
his New York Times review of the movie, summed up the Cooper effect: "The opening
and closing credits are so good, they're almost worth sitting through the film for."
Indeed, the word in Hollywood is that some filmmakers have refused to work with
Cooper, says Dawn of the Dead director Zach Snyder, because he's "the guy who makes
title sequences better than the movie." Not since Saul Bass' legendary preludes to The
Man With the Golden Arm (1955) and Vertigo (1958) have credits attracted such
attention. Cooper counts Bass' work, along with Stephen Frankfurt's lead-in for To Kill
a Mockingbird (1962), as his greatest influences.

Directors don't call on Cooper for a signature style; they hire him to dig under the
celluloid and tap into the symbolism of a film. That aptitude first became apparent in
1995, with the abrasive and highly stylized intro to David Fincher's Se7en. In it, the
letters - hand-scratched by Cooper with a needle onto film stock, frame by painstaking
frame - disintegrate to the industrial rhythms of a remix of Nine Inch Nails' "Closer."
The oft-imitated setup perfectly captured the addled mind of the movie's serial killer and
set the tone for the entire film. "It's a unique blend of auteur and creative genius that
makes his sequences memorable - but not at the expense of the film," says Grant Curtis,
coproducer of Spider-Man and Spider-Man 2. "That's what makes Kyle truly unique, his
innate sensibility that opening title sequences are not separate from the film, they're part
of it."

Propelled by Se7en's success, Cooper left the design firm R/Greenberg Associates,
where he'd spent seven years - first in New York and then in Los Angeles. In 1996, with
RGA colleagues Chip Houghton and Peter Frankfurt, Cooper founded Imaginary
Forces, which quickly established itself as the hottest design shop in Hollywood,
creating everything from the Netscape browser's comet field logo to the increasingly
elaborate main titles for dozens of films. For The Mummy, Cooper conducted extensive
historical research and designed a unique typeface that was part roman letters, part
hieroglyphics. The words were then superimposed on a torch-lit backdrop of ancient
Egyptian scrolls and pyramid inscriptions. For Arlington Road, it was all about the
edits; he spliced together serene images of suburbia - picket fences, kids on bikes,
American flags - then added harsh yellow and red hues to give a sense of paranoia.
"Kind of like, 'Hello, welcome to suburbia as hell!'" says Arlington Road director Mark
Pellington, who drove through dozens of neighborhoods with Cooper, capturing footage
on super-8 and 16-millimeter film for the sequence.

As Imaginary Forces grew, Cooper found he was spending more time managing than
creating. Last year, he went solo. "To be honest, the move was about me just wanting to
do my own work," he says. "People stand in line waiting to ask you things. I prefer to
execute my own ideas." Frankfurt has a slightly different spin on the breakup, as he
explains in Andrea Codrington's biography Kyle Cooper. "More often than not, Kyle is
saying, 'I know how to make these pieces fit together. I have this recipe in my head, and
none of you know how to work together in the way I know you should.'"

With his new venture, Prologue Films, Cooper has scaled back and refocused. He
promises to make only a few films at a time and not to grow the staff beyond eight, give
or take a few freelancers. "I'm not sure Prologue will take the design world by storm,
but I do know that we will never do anything that I do not think is perfect. I will never
compromise again." Flubber II, it seems, will have to find somebody else.

As a filmmaker, Cooper is all about precision. When you're doing a two-minute movie,
being obsessive about every cut, every transition, and every manipulation of every letter
is a job requirement. But so is letting go, something Cooper has a tough time with.
When he was 14, he spent seven weeks etching the texture of a dragon's body - from its
jagged teeth to the individual hairs on its back - with a pin onto a metal plate. "I would
deal with things in my life, difficult things, by just being very introspective," he says.
Cooper's first full-length feature, New Port South, bombed at the box office in 2001.
Stung, he brought the movie back to the editing bay, where he still obsessively refines
it.

The production on Spider-Man 2's titles, from conception to delivery, has stretched
almost an entire year. Cooper began by digitally scanning dozens of vintage Spider-
Man comics and editing them together in a blink-and-you-miss-it five-second montage
that encompasses the entire story arc of the first film. After that, "the credits get caught
in the web. I love the moment when you kind of figure it out," he says. "Oh wow,
metaphors! Flies in a web, type in a web like flies. That's great!"

• Unlike the first Spider-Man's title sequence - which took months of tweaking
with software apps including Cinema 4D, Adobe After Effects, Maya, and
Photoshop - Cooper this time relies on old-school filmic techniques. The credit's
primary conflict between Spidey and arch nemesis Dr. Octavius is presented in
striking stop-motion animation. Which brings us back to Cooper's black widows
and the octopus. "I always liked the black cat fighting the white cat in the main
titles for Walk on the Wild Side," Cooper says, citing Saul Bass' classic work. In
 homage to Bass, Cooper pits his spider and his octopus against each other.
"They both have eight legs and very similar body designs," he says, showing off
the photos he took of his pets for inspiration. "The metaphors of these animals
already existed. I just thought the animals fighting would

Like a lot of Hollywood heavies, Cooper is translating his skills to videogames. His
goal is to enliven game openers with interactivity. For Metal Gear Solid 3: Snake Eater,
due from Konami in November, Cooper makes the gamer the director. Players can tap a
button on the joystick to transform the credit's type, say, from a snake to a snake
skeleton. "I like seamlessly dissolving between camouflage, which is intrinsic to the
gameplay," he says, "and the texture of the snake's skin." Offering such control to the
player comes at a cost, though. "It's like making four different titles," Cooper says.

Cooper's success has brought new attention to an art form that has long been considered
an afterthought, spawning a host of rivals and copycats. "There's a lot of people trying
to be Kyle now," concedes Cooper. But how many of them have an octopus at home?

Cooper's former production company, Imaginary Forces, takes its name from a line in
the prologue of William Shakespeare's 'King Henry the Fifth': "And let us, ciphers to
this great accompt, On your imaginary forces work." The decision to take the name of
the company from this prologue is based on the idea that opening titles/credits (Cooper's
main area of expertise) often act like a prologue to a film. Cooper himself claims to be a
big fan of Kenneth Branagh's Henry V (1989).

He created the Marvel Comics "Flip Book" Logo panel that was first introduced during
the opening of the original Spider-Man movie, for which he did the titles. It has since
been used in many subsequent Marvel-based films, and according to Laura Ziskin,
producer of Spider-Man, received an ovation from the audience during the movie's
premiere.

Imaginary Forces y ahora Prologue Films son dos sellos que responden a la pasión del
tímido Kyle Cooper por el diseño (especialmente por los títulos de crédito). Hace unos
años que Cooper abandonó Imaginary Forces para crear su propia firma: Prologue Films
(con su book en el primer video de este post).

La leyenda asegura que Cooper trató de cursar una tesis doctoral sobre este tema, pero
que se tutor lo descartó por considerar que los títulos de crédito eran un tema demasiado
simple. Si Saul Bass fue el pionero, la trayectoria de Cooper le avala como un
renovador del lenguaje que, además, ha incorporado el ordenador en todo el proceso
creativo.

Fundada en 1996 y con más de 70 empleados repartidos entre Nueva York y

Hollywood, Imaginary Forces dio el salto internacional con los apreciados créditos de
Seven. Luego han venido trabajos que no han defraudado en films como Wild Wild
West, Marvel, la grandísima Gattaca (primero) o Ray (segundo).

Como contaban en 2004 desde Wired, “with his new venture, Prologue Films, Cooper
has scaled back and refocused. He promises to make only a few films at a time and not
to grow the staff beyond eight, give or take a few freelancers. ‘I’m not sure Prologue
will take the design world by storm, but I do know that we will never do anything that I
do not think is perfect. I will never compromise again’”.

Sobre Seven, el diario El Nacional le realizó una entrevista en 2001 en la que afirmaba
que el director “David (Fincher) sabía que tenía que introducir al asesino en los
primeros minutos de la película, o en el peor de los casos lograr una presentación de
créditos que mantuviera a la gente excitada, ya que Kevin Spacey no aparece sino
después de la primera hora. En Seven, la presentación es completamente consistente con
el lenguaje que usa el director a lo largo del film. De hecho, los créditos se convierten
en el inicio de la película. Allí, los modelos tipográficos se convierten en actores para
mí”.

Hace unos años estuvo en el Festival de Sitges, y los asiduos cuentan que son unos
modestos genios de la comunicación.