Prank Panel Opening Titles

Opening titles for the Funny or Die / TruTV pilot Prank Panel, with Trevor Moore. When MADtv’s creators and executive producers teamed up with Funny or Die for a new prank/panel hybrid show they tapped my creative firm, Ogmog to establish the tone in an opening title sequence and graphics pacakge.

Working with Illustrator/animator Jesse Benjamin, I creative directed and art directed the project. We created a 15 second opening title sequence with style guide and drop zones for future episodes, as well as intro & outro bumpers, lower thirds and a mortise.

For the score, I brought in composer Danny Walter. Our first round of creative started as an informal conversation with the show’s star and executive producer Trevor Moore, motion graphic designer Jesse Benjamin and myself at a picnic table in the backyard of the Funny or Die offices. We discussed the challenge at hand: coming up with a captivating and immediately recognizable graphics package for the pilot.

The twist was the format: this prank show was couched in a late night panel show format. Our job was to bridge the gap between the “anything goes” nature of a prank show with the grounded and cool style of a late night talk show.

Our launching point was thinking about the flat colors, sunset hues, and bold confident typography of our favorite late night shows. We kept the sexy dusk colors, but needed to find a design element that communicated the run-and-gun feel of a prank show. That’s where the tactile grunge, stains, and other distress came in. Light leaks were also a great way to add an organic element to the slickness of late night talk shows. Word bubbles were used as a design element to carry the weight of moving us from guest to guest and supporting the typography. They also aligned with the format of a talk show where some of the biggest laughs came from Trevor and his guests – great comedians like Pete Holmes – talking about the pranks he had done, which honestly were funny enough on their own.

Deliverables were show logo, opening titles, lower thirds, transitional bumpers, mortise, etc. Unlike a typical prank show, the opening titles needed to be flexible to include rotating guests each episodes, which meant the final deliverables couldn’t be a baked video sequence, but had to be clearly organized and labled for an in house post team to adapt each episode.