One of the first images that title credits designer Oliver Latta received for the second season of “Severance” was of Mark S., played by Adam Scott, carrying a bunch of balloons. Ben Stiller, executive producer and frequent director of the series, captioned it: “Credits became real.”
The hypnotic sequence, animated from three dimensional scans of Scott, became one of the series’ calling cards when it first premiered in early 2022 on Apple TV+. It earned Latta, a 3-D artist based in Berlin, an Emmy for main title design in 2022. For the second season, Latta started designing an entirely new version. Set to the same eerily catchy tune by composer Theodore Shapiro, the Season 2 incarnation of the credits — seen for the first time in Episode 2, now streaming — are even more haunting, diving into the surreal world of Mark’s brain and introducing other characters and landscapes.
This time, Latta visited the New York set, but despite being given key plot points, he still hadn’t seen any of the episodes by the time he spoke to The Times just days before the premiere on Jan. 17. In fact, he prefers to work with as little information as possible so he can create something original. Still, there are secrets within the brief but entrancing clip. Latta walked us through some of those.
