Legion
FOX Broadcasting | FX NETWORKS
Bold, intelligent, and visually arresting, Legion is a surreal and daring departure from traditional superhero conceits.
Fans of Legion obsess over symbolism and meaning, so our main objective was to show, not tell. For season 2, we developed over 50 pieces of original content that played with format, with form, and with perspective.
To illustrate the recurring theme of a dualism, we created (by hand) thaumatropes: a disk with an image on each side that when twirled causes the images to blend into one, due to the persistence of vision.
Inspired by a faux ad from the Legion comic offering a cure for the X-Gene, we created a series of ads promoting random objects from each episode.
With 60s mod, a 70s vision-of-the-future, and 80s sci-fi kitsch, the ads feel torn from the pages of Legion’s world. Each ad featured a short headline promoting a feature of the object related to the episode.
As much of what inspired Legion is drawn from the music and style of 60s rock bands, particularly Pink Floyd, we created a series of phenakistiscopes that spin like a record on a turntable, set to the show's soundtrack.
As the speed of the rotating disk increases, the accelerated frame rate creates the illusion of movement.
To visualize the loss of control within the minds of Legion's characters, we gave up creative control and developed a program that generated its own disruptive content.
The program created art from assets fed into it: looping videos, inanimate objects, patterns, and sound loops. The art animated to the rhythm of the sound loop, creating infinitely random, brutalist video content.
We like to think of it as Artificial Improvisation.
To visualize the dualism explored in Legion, we created split (unhinged) diptychs that can’t rest on what connects them. As viewers swipe left and right, the diptych cannot be viewed as one image, by nature of the application.
To explore the theme of mass hysteria, fans swiped through Instagram carousels to zoom in and enter the physical reality created in the minds of Legion's characters.
My roles
Concepts, creative direction, design, copywriting & animation.
THE TEAM
Cameron K. Lewis, Hoa Han, Emma Smith & Bing Zhang.