the crew

It was a tight schedule but we managed to build everything in a week and get all the shots done in five days. I had a fantastic crew to work with: Rick Orner, Morgan Hay, Kathleen Lolley, Ellen Kim, Cameron Baity, and Jonathan Silsby. Brad Berling's concept art provided the starting point. Brad is a graphic design artist at The Picture Mill, a Los Angeles company that specializes in title sequences. 

We built all the sets and props on the Picture Mill lot.

Working late into the night, Rick builds a giant forced perspective vent.
Ellen made fake rat poop out of cotton to decorate the sets with. It looked so real noone wanted to touch it. Here Morgan attends to some details. Lolley made all the textures very painterly. Here she adds depth to the forced perspective vent. We had to make it big to allow the bulky camera rig to fit inside.
We had two shooting stages going at all times. Here Cameron tears paper as I animate a puddle of water. Note the gravity-defying light switch that Ellen made. We reversed gravity throughout the title sequence to suggest that things were getting 'strange'.
Rick makes some adjustments to his ingenious pendulum counterweight that allowed the main Willard title card to sway with gravity -- even though the set was upside down. To the right is the main title card; we shot upside down so that the water leaking from the pipes would later appear to be dripping up toward the ceiling. The water was puppeteered with syringes to choreograph the timing of drips with the camera moves.
Set pieces were built in sections and could be recombined to form different compositions. This saved us construction time and allowed flexibility when setting up for the motion-control camera.