You can overhear a lot of weird things walking through the park, but an excited, sudden exclamation of “What if it was a horde of rats?!” is definitely up there. Yet the reason, in this particular case, wasn’t an ominous one: It was part of the brainstorming process for the opening title sequence for Netflix’s recent (excellent) adaptation of “ The Decameron .” Mark Bashore and Katrina Crawford were the parkgoers in question and the creative directors of Plains of Yonder.
The studio began as a design firm in Seattle and developed an Emmy-nominated knack for crafting opening titles for television series — something they say lots of people assume gets scripted by the writers on a given series, but in actuality, creative studios like theirs get brought in and work with the showrunners to execute. They’ve spent a couple of decades now crafting striking opening titles for shows from “True Blood” to both seasons of “ The White Lotus ” to Taika Waititi’s take on “ Time Bandits .” Whatever the project, the goal for Plains of Yonder is to come up with a set of concepts (they usually pitch four to six different ideas) that can visually introduce a show’s tone or genre, create an energy that mirrors the series’, and get the audience excited to watch what happens next.
But how they do that visually — animation or live-action or some combination — how long the credits run, and whether the sequences ever change? That all varies. Each show is its own pu.