The Girl With the Dragon Tattoo Title Sequence / Blur Studio

Accomplished and unreal Blur Studio, a Venice, CA-based animation and visual effects group, designed the dark and beauteous opening title sequence for David Fincher‘s The Girl With the Dragon Tattoo. The process took them nearly four months to finish, they had just completed the work in November. The black tar, motor oil, and squid ink, caliginous moving imagery is set to Trent Reznor and Karen O‘s cover of Led Zeppelin‘s Immigrant Song.

–@teemunny

The Wrap:

Blur Creative Director Tim Miller told TheWrap that Fincher instructed him to design an opening that would “look like James Bond if he was a 22-year old disturbed cutter.”

“We wanted it to look like a nightmare — a bad dream that tells elements of Salander’s past,” Miller told TheWrap.

The most challenging element, Miller said, was getting the black ooze that seeps throughout the title sequence to look realistic. To that end, Blur tapped fluid special effects specialists Spatial Harmonics and Fusion CIS to help execute the inky liquid.

The most challenging element, Miller said, was getting the black ooze that seeps throughout the title sequence to look realistic. To that end, Blur tapped fluid special effects specialists Spatial Harmonics and Fusion CIS to help execute the inky liquid.

In all, there are a total of 252 shots in the clip with each cut lasting for roughly 24 frames a second, giving the whole thing a hyper-adrenalized and spastic feeling that matches the troubled title character’s disturbed state of mind.

io9:

Tim Miller: [The title sequence] was always supposed to be a very abstract version of key moments in the book and about Lisbeth. It was really supposed to be her nightmare sequence. Being a hacker is such a big part of her personality and who she was, we needed some imagery for that but it’s kind of hard to represent that abstractly. So the ones we came up with were the keyboard elements.

Everything was supposed to be a fever dream of Salander’s. David wanted this to be her personal nightmare, flashbacking through all these moments. Early on, we knew it was supposed to feel like a nightmare. When we originally started out he wanted to find some sort of defining creative pulsar that we could head towards — like for Alien, it was [H.R.] Giger’s work. It was the aesthetic that guided that whole movie.

There’s two different sequences with hands, one with Lisbeth — that’s my favorite. The hands come up and caress her face, and then they melt it. The vignette was called hot hands. We did another one where the same kind of thing happens to Blomkvist except he’s torn apart by the hands. David wanted the hands on Lisbeth to almost represent all that’s bad in men.

If you look at Keith Richard’s hands, from the Rolling Stones, they’re these gnarled, arthritic, it looks like people beat his hands with clubs. It’s amazing there’s so much character in his hands. If you look at the hands on her face they’re these gnarled and very textured. And if you look at the hands on Blomkvist, they’re more refined. It speaks to wealth and power trying to silence him and rip him apart. They’re rich people hands, and with her it’s the hands of bad men. It’s interesting when you do this shit because David will key in on that. I focus on the hands and what they’re doing, and David will add that little extra layer and detail that is so cool.

There’s a woman who is being beaten and her face is shattered. That’s supposed to represent Lisbeth’s mother being beaten by her father, which you only find out about in the second book. Lisbeth is caught in the violence of that. The vignettes are not just from this movie, they’re from all three books. We wanted to tell the story of all three books in these 2 and a half minutes. Moments like the beating of the Mother and the burning Father are from the later books.