Home Before Dark: Season 1

Hot off the heels of CRAZY RICH ASIANS, Director Jon Chu and Editor Myron Kerstein returned to Aspect for design and animation support on the series they were developing with Showrunner, Dana Fox. HOME BEFORE DARK became the kind of project we’d always dreamed of. The series follows a young girl, Hilde, who moves from Brooklyn NY to the small lakeside town her father left behind. While there, her dogged pursuit of the truth leads her to unearth a cold case that everyone in town, including her father, tried hard to bury. The project held a tremendous opportunity for the Aspect design team because as an investigative journalist, Hilde has a particular talent in putting clues together in her search for the truth. The filmmakers wanted us to come up with a visual “system” to express to the audience visually, just how Hilde puts 2 and 2 together. We call these sequences “Hilde-Visions”. We developed this visual language from elements that Hilde would use to express herself in her journal – paper, post-it notes, newspaper articles, xeroxes, her handwriting, etc. Our goal was to make this visual expression not only stylish and exciting, but to ensure that the sequences fundamentally support the storytelling.

Similarly, the filmmakers asked us to develop a title sequence that would tonally set the audience up for each episode. We suggested the idea of creating a unique sequence for each episode. By presenting the clues that Hilde uncovers as the episodes progress, we were able to both remind the audience of important plot points, while also teasing beats yet to come.