“The zen garden is the type of garden that’s providing people more freedom in a sense of point of view, because it’s meant to be viewed from a certain distance, and from whichever angles you are seeing objects in the garden, it provides a relativity between those rocks or the landscape and how you see things,” says Elastic creative director and main title designer Nadia Tzuo. “It’s like how we follow the protagonist, John Blackthorne, because he’s a foreigner experiencing this entirely alien landscape of Japan and he’s sort of in the onlooker position the whole time. So, we thought that would be perfect to follow his ship in the sequence through the garden.” Below, Tzuo gives insight into how the main title sequence came together.
- “We’ve been careful with the look in the texture and details because the show has been created in such an authentic and thoughtful way, and we want to keep everything as true as possible. For example, the type of trees, or there’s a certain look of the moss on the rock for zen gardens, or even the shape of the mountains… it is so easy to let it look not like Japan if you are not careful.”
- “Using Cinema 4D, we had some good experience with creating sandy, fluid objects in our previous projects, so we decided to use a RealFlow plugin for the sand simulation.”
- “We get to see the islands that represent mountains, and then you see the ocean and the villages, and you see a symbol in the sand that’s forming the family crest of Toranaga and you pass through the cross of Lady Mariko.”
- “The team of the show had been extremely supportive and helpful in providing us all the things for references and the 3D model assets. We received a lot of production shots and items actually used in the show, such as the fire arrows.”
- “There were so many photographs of the helmet with all of the details, so we were able to model that based on the reference. Of course, in the show, all the helmets are real because people are wearing them, so we just had to recreate them in 3D.”
- “Some of the story beats would be shared with us as important to feature, like the earthquake, because it’s also part of the idea that everything has this sense of fragility. You see the symbols and they get blown away in no time, and then you see the mountain and it crumbles. So, it’s the prevailing sense of nothing stays forever.”