To capture the feelings of polarity, conflict, and tension in the title sequence for War, the HBO legal drama about a fictional, high-stakes divorce case, designers created an animation that captures conflict through clashing colors.
Imaginary Forces, the acclaimed production studio behind title sequences for Stranger Things, Mad Men, and the 2026 Milan Cortina Games, as well as War, wanted to express the visceral nature of the show’s namesake in a way that felt abstract and impressionistic. To do that, they used black, white, and red paints animated in splotchy, splattered, and kinetic brush strokes that move like they’re battling on screen. Considering the characters’ extreme wealth, the idea of playing with art to do that felt like a natural way to show it.
War is set in London and stars Dominic West as the founder of a fictional social media site, Zephyr, and Sienna Miller as his wife, a movie star whose new film is a period drama called The Milliner. Their ensuing divorce descends, as the title suggests, into an all-out, winner-take-all battle.
“We did a lot of tests internally,” Ronnie Koff, creative director at Imaginary Forces, says of the creative development process. After starting with physically painting on glass, they pivoted to digital paint brushes on the Procreate iPad app so they could iterate faster. Initially, they were inspired by the mid-twentieth-century expressionist Franz Kline, who painted abstract brushstrokes to capture emotion through line quality and positive and negative space. But that didn’t really get at the feeling Imaginary Forces was going for.
“At the very beginning it wasn’t working,” Koff tells Fast Company. “My challenge was, how do you take something that is purely abstract where you just get an emotion from it, and give it a literal, almost anthropomorphized quality where it feels like there’s tension through the animation that you create.”
Koff’s team eventually began referencing boxing as a way of establishing the look of a punch and counterpunch between two opponents, and the title sequence shows those boxing-inspired movements to suggest the idea of a fight. The color palette is mostly black and white to quickly communicate the idea of opponents, with a red accent color to add a visceral quality, he says.
The paint strokes also have a three-dimensional, physical texture that Koff says is inspired by the scratch board quality of the 1996 title sequence for Se7en, directed by Kyle Cooper, which became the catalyst for his cofounding of Imaginary Forces three decades ago this year. That title sequence showed the potential for creative intros that contribute to a show’s narrative, but these days, technology can make that harder than ever to accomplish.
“One of the things that I’m always up against is the skip button,” Koff says. “How do you engage people in a way that feels a little different, so people aren’t immediately clicking that? And so my first thought is to really present something a little different, something that might be a little unusual but could grab your attention at the same time.”
By animating painterly brushstrokes with an aggressive physicality, War‘s title sequence commandeers a symbol of wealth—fine art—and transforms it into an emotional visualization of combat.