Silent Hill

The first film adaptation of Konami’s popular survival horror game series was done in 2006 by French film production company Metropolitan Filmexport. Paris-based motion designer Kook Ewo, whose studio was located inside the building of Metropolitan Films, was hired to create the Main and Main-On-End Titles and to create the visual effects for some of the special sequences in the movie.

For the end title sequence, Ewo pushed the possibilities of After Effects to its limits to capture the essence of the game’s gritty-gloomy horror aesthetic in ghostly black-and-white.

In an interview for the French website Générique Cinema about the making of his Silent Hill title sequence, title designer Kook Ewo explains how he told the director, Christophe Gans, during the preparations for a shoot about his plans to start Scripted Reality, a company that would mainly focus on creating film credits. “Christophe Gans’ reaction was positive and a few days later he sent me the first version of the script. I started to get seriously interested in the world of Silent Hill, its creators, its influences… I then submitted ten short written proposals for the opening credits.”

“The concept that I proposed was simple,” recalls the designer, “a subjective camera moves ‘Silent-Hillish,’ in which one passes the creatures of the film and photographs of the actors, torn, pinned… All that in a pop-rock music video style.

“To sell the idea, I rendered the thirty first seconds of the credits with After Effects, based on the idea that my principal constraint (the impossibility of modeling complicated 3-D objects in After Effects) was going to push me to find solutions similar to those used by the designers of the game.

Continues Ewo, “On a visual level, I took inspiration from the Silent Hill 2 game and from pictures of abandoned hospitals that I found on the net.”

Article: Remco Vlaanderen, © Submarine Channel. 16 August 2006. Last update: 15 November 2019