The only time we’re not shooting documentary style on The Real World is when we take two days to shoot the Opening Titles.  This the opening music montage of the show that introduces each of the roommates, and the title of the show.  We typically don’t spend a lot of time or money on this because we have to break the wall of silence between the crew and the roommates to shoot this.  It’s the only time the roommates get direction on how and where to look, and for the first time ever they feel like TV stars.  After two days of hair and makeup artists fussing over them, they get a taste of that celebrity lifestyle, and it never quite leaves their consciousness.  So the goal is always to make this simple and easy for the roommates, with as little production as possible so they can easily go back into the documentary mode.

Typically the opening titles are a scant twenty seconds, but when we added the eighth roommate to the Brooklyn season we increased the length to twenty-five seconds.  That’s not a lot of time, and each roommate gets about two seconds to flash their name on screen.  So the images have to be sharp and clear, and easy to read in a flash. 
The first thing we always conceive is the ending:  where to put The Real World logo.  Originally seen as painted graffiti on the brick wall of a New York City warehouse, various producers have been very creative with how the logo is revealed at the end of the titles.  It’s been seen on a sailboat in Miami, a surfboard in Hawaii, and a slot machine in Las Vegas.  For the Austin season we branded it onto a guitar – yes that was real and done on location…it took four new Gibson guitars.  The logo was seen on the Liberty Bell for the Philadelphia season, but that was superimposed graphically.  I think my personal favorite use of the logo was the Seattle season.  As the roommates lived near the fish market, a fish came flying right at the camera, caught by a handler to reveal the logo painted onto the side of the fish.  Genius!

Of course there are always those logo shots we shoot that don’t quite work out.  For The Real World Denver we shot a sequence of the roommates rolling a spotlight onto the famous stage at Red Rocks.  They turn on the spotlight and -- bam – the logo shows up big and bold on the face of the natural red rock.  At least that was the idea.  It just didn’t look that big and bold on video.  So we punted…and animated the logo that season.

So we get to Cancun, Season 22!  What can we do with the logo that’s never been done before?  We came up with the idea of putting it in the ME hotel’s big round infinity pool at edge of the beach, and shooting as an aerial.  We embossed the logo onto four large pieces of plastic and at 7am on a cold January morning for Cancun, the art department team along with yours truly, sunk the pieces into the pool and arranged then into the proper configuration.  We encountered two problems:  1) the currents in the pool kept moving the pieces along the bottom, and 2) we had rain and thunderstorms that morning that kept the helicopter from flying over the pool.  Finally we got everything in sync, and the chopper flew in low over the ocean right up to the ME - and the logo.  At just the right moment, Production Coordinator Liz Ruecker swam over the logo.  Pretty impressive!  It’s all real, no camera tricks, no special effects.  Beautiful.

Next time, we’ll talk about how the Cancun roommates reacted to shooting the opening titles.