Spotlight on Raoul Marks

I studied design at Curtin University back in the early 2000s and worked as a graphic designer. I spent some time in the UK working in film advertising and returned to Sydney/Melbourne and started focusing on motion graphics for television/film in about 2010.

Film has been a great educator for me. I lean towards that and photography as a central source for inspiration. Classics like ‘Blade Runner’, ‘Alien’, ‘2001’, ‘Videodrome’ and ‘Akira’ [Katsuhiro Otomo] have all been very influential in informing my style. Those films are visually very striking but they also manage to get under your skin. They have a certain atmosphere or tone to them that is hard to pinpoint. They are escapist but also leave you with a slightly queasy or existential type feeling. Obviously I’m not making feature films but those tonal qualities are what get me excited about image making and I often go back to them to get the brain ticking over.

Recently I’ve been really getting into Jeffrey Smart’s paintings. He had an amazing sense for colour and geometry – a master at creating an unnerving image.

In terms of more contemporary inspirations, they come and go but currently what I’ve been finding exciting is ‘Under the Skin’ by Jonathan Glazer, anything by Adam Curtis, and I’m keen to sit down and watch the latest series of ‘Black Mirror’ [TV series].

First, we are extremely lucky to get paid for what we do. It doesn’t feel like work -usually. I’ve always found great enjoyment in artistic output. Working with digital tools is particularly rewarding because it’s an extremely effective process. Ultimately, all creative endeavours are somewhat frustrating as you are trying to translate what’s in your mind's eye to the page or screen. The smoother and quicker that translation is, the more rewarding the emotional response for the artist. I think that is why I lean towards digital tools. I’m basically impatient and want to get the images out as quickly as possible.

I work with a team of people and very closely with a creative director. I find that process of trying to reach a common visual language while executing something very specific a complex but rewarding challenge. We are limited by the simplicity of language, which is our common denominator, so it’s great developing a shorthand over time with colleagues that helps us communicate more fluently.

Looking more broadly towards client and audience, it’s interesting to see how our work is interpreted. It’s not always as intended and sometimes that’s great. We had people a few episodes into ‘True Detective’ saying the titles had clues as to who the Yellow King was. At that point we hadn’t watched the full series so I had no idea what they were talking about.

In other words, I think you can over-manage and over-think a project from an audience perspective. If you can make something that feels new, that feels novel and excites you in a way that is hard to reduce to a logical statement, then you’re a good way to creating something that will make an impact in the wider world.

I’ve been using Cinema 4D since I was at university. I found the more cumbersome, programmer-skewed methodologies of other 3D packages were a barrier to entry. At that point, Cinema was set up in a way that made it easy to jump in as a novice and get good results very quickly. That initial quick reward loop made it an addictive piece of software and kept me using it on-and-off over the last decade.

It has evolved over the years and has become very resilient and versatile for a whole array of creative applications. It also plugs in with a lot of other tools – thankfully CGI tools have become very agnostic, with imports and exports, so Cinema 4D is often working as the mothership for a whole family of tools for specific tasks.

I started out with Cinema 4D many years ago and there wasn’t nearly the same support network. We felt a bit like the new kids on the block. But slowly and surely over the years the user base has grown steadily to the point where it seems to be one of the biggest groups of artists. If you run into a snag there’s usually an answer a short ‘Google’ away. If you look at a site like lesterbanks.com, I often find the majority of material is related to Cinema 4D, not to mention the myriad of other almost exclusively Cinema 4D sites like GreyscaleGorilla, etc.

As I mentioned, Cinema 4D has become a central mothership of sorts. It’s at the center of a wide range of tools. Most important for me was the development of the Octane Render engine. It’s fundamentally changed the way I work. As a freelancer with my own gear I don’t have access to a large render farm. Octane basically replaces a render farm with the power found in modern graphics cards.

But more importantly than that, it allows me to light and texture in real-time. It takes another big chunk of time out of the creative feedback loop, which makes the number of iterations you go through almost infinitely larger. That’s a huge thing when it comes to creating complex realistic-looking visuals. The fewer the limitations the technology has, the closer we get to the artist’s Holy Grail – being able to perfectly translate what’s in your mind's eye to the page. In addition to that, tools like 3D Coat, Fusion 360 and Megascans offer a huge amount of power for creative output.

The core tools have been very solid for a while now, so some of the new updates often go past me. But generally it’s the little workflow and stability updates that really help me out. Support for Alembic was extremely useful. Updates to the Knife tool and the Polygon Pen were also great additions.

In essence I’m probably a frustrated film maker, so I think that’s what pushes me towards realism. That said, it’s not realism for realism sake that interests me. Real world photography is often a very carefully constructed process. They’re not angling for realism for its own sake - they want to make an image that arrests the eye. I have the same goal, but just use different tools.

In terms of title design, primarily we are informed by the imagery, content and themes of the show. The pitch document goes a long way to interpreting that aesthetic and fusing it with our own influences and interpretation of the story.

Personally, I’m often drawn to either focusing on the macro or the micro. The show itself will obviously be exploring the meat of those narratives and extended themes and meaning. The titles shouldn’t be merely retelling those points, but circling around them, alluding to something more symbolic about the overall narrative message, or focusing in on a minute detail that reflects a wider simplicity about the story.

For example the titles we did for ‘Halt and Catch Fire’, was an impossible close-up sequence of the electrical signal running along wires and mainboards to illuminate the little flicking light at the front of a 1980s-era PC. In itself, it’s a regular, mundane piece of operating procedure for a computer from that time, but we used it allegorically to illustrate the competing forces driving young tech entrepreneurs towards a new technological dawn. The birth of a new idea, and the great pressure these characters were put under, transferred neatly into a metaphorical world of electrons and circuitry.

That double meaning is often a good area to explore, as it’s conceptually interesting for the viewer as well as allowing you to make broad symbolic comments about the show’s themes without having to explicitly depict it. A great example of this is the title sequence for ‘Dexter’. It simply shows a man making his breakfast, but filmed in such a way as to allude to the more sinister intentions of the protagonist’s double life.

I usually start research for sources outside our industry. Photography and film, as I’ve mentioned, are great starting points. But fields like contemporary art, sculpture, painting and more experimental forms can also be very productive.

A lot of artwork may be rather impenetrable to a general audience, but when reinterpreted and placed in a different context, it can be very effective in creating striking imagery. I guess you could call it cross-pollination. I think we benefit from bringing in inspiration from as wide a field as possible.

I’m really lucky to work with some very talented people. Patrick Clair, my Director at Elastic, has been consistently coming up with brilliant ideas, so a large part of my success goes in thanks to his genius efforts.

What I hope comes from things like the Emmy wins is the freedom and support to explore more risky and innovative ideas in our work. I’ve already found it surprising how open-minded and progressive the clients we work with are about the concepts we put to them. If I can continue to work in titles design for the near future I’ll be very content. It’s a privilege.

It’s hard to tell what’s going to hit with the voting audience, but I think there’s something seriously brilliant about Philip K. Dick’s original novel that shines through in the TV adaptation. An alternate universe, in which the Axis won the Second World War, created for us a plethora of symbolic imagery to work with. Shots of the Nazi eagle emblazoned over the American bald eagle create a whole list of connotations. I think that subversion of American icons lead to the titles having an iconic quality and thus being awarded the gong.