Gentleman Scholar collaborates with Harmony Korine to create the “Spring Breakers” title design.
When Director Harmony Korine needed the perfect opening for his latest feature-length masterpiece, Spring Breakers, he turned to his friends and collaborators at LA-based creative studio Gentleman Scholar. The famously exacting American auteur entrusted the Gentleman Scholar team with the entire concept and design process. The result is a gorgeous testament to hallucinatory visual excess – a title sequence that stands toe-to-toe with the film’s glittering feminine allure.
Easily ranking as one of the most buzzed-about Hollywood films of the year, Spring Breakers was already well on its way onto the pop-culture landscape when Gentleman Scholar began working with Korine to establish the eerie aesthetics of the titles and credits. Numerous attempts with other designers had left the director especially receptive to new approaches, and he invited the Gentleman Scholar team to invent its own creative brief. “We eventually came up with some weird stuff,” noted GS creative Will Johnson, “but it vibed with him from the get-go. Harmony is a really open dude. He had some ideas as far as framework was concerned, but it was a very open dialogue. Ultimately, we came to him with several ideas and he was very receptive, so things progressed from there.”
The Gentleman Scholar designers were relentless in their search for ideas, eventually finding a muse in the day-glow aesthetics of their own Los Angeles surroundings. “We drew a lot of inspiration from our own “local cheesy vacation spots,”” says GS creative William Campbell. “We went to a Santa Monica beach and explored around there, drawing on the kitschy local beach community ‘look’ and had illustrators and artists on the boardwalk create little things that we eventually drew from to give the titles their final look.”
Gentleman Scholar creatives worked tirelessly with Korine to match the tone of the title sequences to the film’s story, allowing their work to fit seamlessly into Korine’s universe. “The vibe of his storytelling is the kind of work we love to do,” notes Johnson enthusiastically, “but the most exciting thing about this project was the breadth of creative freedom we were given. We really excel at matching an initial concept to flawless execution, and it’s something we would love to do more often.”
Source: Gentleman Scholar
Formerly Editor-in-Chief of Animation World Network, Jennifer Wolfe has worked in the Media & Entertainment industry as a writer and PR professional since 2003.
