Kyle Cooper Prologue

Kyle Cooper (Prologue)

Kyle Cooper is a director and designer of film title sequences who holds an MFA in graphic design from the Yale School of Art, where he studied under graphic designer Paul Rand, as well as a BFA from the University of Massachusetts at Amherst. In 1996, he co-founded and named creative agency Imaginary Forces. He has directed and produced more than 150 film title and VFX sequences, including Se7en, Spider-Man, and The Mummy. In 2001, he directed a feature film, New Port South.

He moved on to found Prologue Films in 2003, with which he has created title sequences for The Incredible Hulk, Final Destination 5, and The Walking Dead. In 2008, he was a finalist in the National Design Awards. He has earned five Emmy Award nominations and one win for his work on the 81st Annual Academy Awards. He also holds the title of Honorary Royal Designer for Industry from the Royal Society of Arts in London.

Prologue is a team of designers and filmmakers that direct live-action infused with typography, editorial techniques, and computer-generated imagery based in Venice, CA.

Founded in 2003 by Kyle and Kimberley Cooper, the company specializes in merging principles of typography and graphic design with sequence, story, and sound. Their recent studio work includes sequences for Mission: Impossible – Ghost Protocol, Sherlock Holmes: A Game of Shadows, Rango, X-Men: First Class, Robin Hood, and American Horror Story, as well as visual effects shots for Prometheus, Battleship, TRON: Legacy, Tropic Thunder, and The Tempest.

Previously, Kyle Cooper was creative director at R/Greenberg Associates in New York and Los Angeles (1988-1996), and in 1996 he named and co-founded Imaginary Forces, where he worked until 2003 when he and Kimberley formed Prologue. In 2010, Prologue partnered with executive producer Alexander Dervin and director Kurt Mattila to form Prologue Pictures, which develops and produces live-action projects for narrative, documentary, and commercial work.

One of their most recent works was on the title for Star Trek Discovery. This proposed a challenge to the group in the way of representing Star Trek as a franchise while also not relying on tired design tropes of the franchise. This was achieved by having not only ‘Star Trek Gurus’ on board ( Creative Director Kyle Cooper and Writer/Historian Kurt Mattila) but a fresh set of eyes who only knew of the series from its rather large cultural blueprint (Spanish-born Creative Director and Designer Ana Criado). She was able to see the series differently and try new things while they were there to ground her in historical context of the series.

“It was as if the graphics themselves tipped their hat to the show’s history and the ephemeral process that went into the design and creation of all of the equipment blueprints and devices over the years,” said Cooper of Criado’s approach to Discovery, noting that her early concept boards presented the material in a completely unorthodox manner. “There was no inky black void of space, no fleets of ships whirring around. It was a bit like the first Marvel logo flipbook animation we worked on, where you felt the analogue history of the brand.”

Criado’s blueprint concept allowed the team to work through the idea of the “second renaissance” in a very direct way. Through this concept, the main titles could metaphorically hit on every major scientific breakthrough and exploratory milestone that had happened in Trek canon up until the beginning of the show, and at the same time transfigure the tenets central to Kirk’s famous mission statement into something the viewer could actually see. “We recognized that this was a very strong concept straight away, and poured all of our efforts and resources into realizing it,” said Criado. From there designing the sequence became a process of posing questions and figuring out what the answer might look like. “How does a bidimensional sketch transform into a complicated starship? What were the original designs for a phaser, a communicator, etc.?”

Later throughout the production they realized that the story wasnt really focused on the captain but on the first officer who was not experienced at all and really wet behind the ears. “We wanted to illustrate the learning process of [Michael Burnham], and bring [the viewer] into this complicated world the same way… one piece at a time.” That decision transformed Discovery’s main titles from a visually arresting historical compendium into a fascinating window into Burnham’s character — an ambitious young officer with more education than actual experience. “She doesn’t have a captain’s log but maybe she has a first officer’s log,” said Mattila. “[Burnham] is a great student of Starfleet history, so it would stand to reason that she would be gathering these blueprints and studying those.”