Led by Creative Director Chris Bialkowski and Executive Producer/Partner Caryn Maclean, the graphics department of bicoastal Union Editorial delivered two high-profile projects breaking this month: the first season of Amazon Prime’s The New Yorker Presents and the four-part Netflix docuseries, Cooked. Both series hail from Academy Award®-winning filmmaker Alex Gibney’s Jigsaw Productions, with whom Union and its artists have collaborated on numerous projects, including Freakonomics: The Movie, Death Row Stories, Taxi to the Dark Side, Mea Maxima Culpa: Silence in the House of God, and Steve Jobs: Man in the Machine.
The New Yorker Presents premiered at the Sundance Film Festival January 27 and debuts with two episodes February 16 on Amazon Prime, followed by two new episodes each Tuesday. Cooked premieres in the Culinary Cinema section of the Berlin Film Festival February 16 and debuts on Netflix February 19.
“Union is a go-to shop for me,” Gibney said. “I know that whenever I work with them – and it is often – they come up with wonderful ideas and their execution is always fantastic. It’s unusual to work with a small company with so much range – great editors who are as passionate as they are skilled; great type design, really creative 2D and 3D animation, and great VFX capability. What they did on The New Yorker Presents and Cooked was fantastic. It was a joy working with Chris and the Union team.”
The New Yorker Presents
America's most award-winning magazine comes to life in the docu-series The New Yorker Presents. Union’s work on the series began in Fall 2014, when Union’s Chris Bialkowski and his team were approached by Jigsaw Productions and Condé Nast Entertainment to design an opening animation for its Amazon Prime pilot. The proposed TV series would feature content inspired by The New Yorker magazine, along with new content including documentaries, short narrative films, comedy, poetry, animation, and cartoons from the hands of acclaimed filmmakers and artists. The pilot drew on the talents of Jonathan Demme, Simon Rich, Alan Cumming, Andrew Garfield, and Emily Flake.
“After exploring several ideas and meeting with The New Yorker’s creative team, we all decided to lean into the huge legacy (90 years or so) of iconic magazine cover art,” Bialkowski recalled. “We sourced high resolution print masters for several of our favorite magazine covers and began deconstructing them for animation.” The team cut out individual elements and painted back in backgrounds behind their cutouts – paying attention to the tactile quality of each different artwork. oil, watercolor, pencil, ink, etc, and maintaining the integrity of each layout. Once each cover was taken apart, they put it all back together again in After Effects. Union animated a journey through these deconstructed covers that resolved into a 3D living room interior with The New Yorker Presents on TV.
All parties loved what they saw, and when the full series was commissioned in Summer 2015, Union was asked to create unique 3D animated vignettes for each of the season’s episodes – in place of the living room interior – the final scene in the intro. The team designed and animated 3D scenes of various indoor and outdoor locations. Each resolved in a TV, tablet, phone, computer, or big screen projection of the TNYP ident, bringing viewers into the content of the show. In addition to the intro sequence, Bialkowski and company designed various interstitial show bumpers, titles, lower thirds, and transitional elements to help editorial bridge the gap among varied show content.
“Together we created 10 amazing episodes packed with powerful, beautiful, fascinating and entertaining short films – and all presented in a new, exciting and visually striking format,” Kahane Cooperman, Executive Producer of The New Yorker Presents, said of the production and post team. “All told, over 50 films (ranging from 1 to 15 minutes) were produced over the course of just months.”
With Season 1 about to be shared with the world, Bialkowski reflected on the karma surrounding Union’s relationship with The New Yorker Presents. “I’m a chronic purger normally, I tend not to get too attached to ‘stuff,’” he observed, “but somehow, The New Yorker is the one magazine that never really makes it’s way into the recycling bin…and I know why: The cover art. Many of my friends are the same way. I think The New Yorker magazines are like baseball cards to those of us who live in tiny apartments with no real bookshelf space to spare – or to spare for anything less than copies of The New Yorker and a few books.”
Cooked
The docu-series Cooked, from best-selling author Michael Pollan (“The Botany of Desire,” “The Omnivore’s Dilemma,” “In Defense of Food”) and Academy Award®-winning filmmaker Alex Gibney (Steve Jobs: The Man in the Machine, Going Clear: Scientology and the Prison of Belief), looks at the “primal human need” to cook and issues a call for people to reclaim lost culinary traditions at home and restore balance to their lives.
Working again with Jigsaw Productions, Union created titles, graphics and interstitial/demo animations for Cooked. Since the show was finished at cinema 4k resolution, the team reworked its typical short-form workflow to accommodate VFX at 4k in long-form. In addition to the main title sequences, edited by Union’s Andrew Doga, Union also created several interstitial animations – including a photo-real 3D render of microscopic molds growing on cheese. “That crazy thing took 5 days straight to render at 4k,” Bialkowski recalled with a laugh. “I love extreme depth of field in imagery, so it’s always fun to work CG at a microscopic scale. With hair, particles, and extreme DOF at 4k resolution, we had our render-farm crunching this scene for several days on end. All those machines rendering kept our office nice and toasty in the middle of summer.”
Union also animated various 2D and hand-drawn animations for each episode and designed a lower-third / title toolkit for the Jigsaw editorial team to use in post.
The series is a co-production of Netflix and Gibney’s Jigsaw Productions. Pollan, Gibney, Stacey Offman, Caroline Suh, Lisa Nishimura and Adam Del Deo serve as executive producers.
“Chris is a talented creative and we are so happy to have him on board,” said Maclean. “The Union graphics department was years in the making and I’m proud to say we are now seeing the results of all of the hard work. Collaborating with Jigsaw is always a pleasure, and the cross-pollination of different worlds, collaborating with documentarians, artists, indie and fashion filmmakers, has made this a very exciting time for us.”
Project Credits
The New Yorker Presents
Production Company: Jigsaw Productions
Graphics Company: Union
Creative Director: Chris Bialkowski
Executive Producer: Caryn Maclean
Producer: Yoko Lytle, Susan Motamed
Designer/Animators: Seokjun Lee, Jun Sik Na, Eric Dalimarta, Kamaur Bonfield
3D Modelers: Garret Walter, Damian Atkinson
Cooked
Production Company: Jigsaw Productions
Directors: “Fire” – Alex Gibney, “Earth” – Peter Bull, “Water” – Caroline Suh, “Air” – Ryan Miller
Graphics Company: Union
Creative Director: Chris Bialkowski
Executive Producer: Caryn Maclean
Producer: Yoko Lytle
Title Sequence Editor: Andrew Doga
Graphic Designer: Seokjun Lee
Animators & VFX artists: Garret Walter, Kamaur Bonfield, Jun Sik Na, Adam Stockett
