Patrick Clair (Extrapolations main title designer) video interview

Few main title designers have been as successful in the last decade as creative director Patrick Clair. The 12-time Emmy Award nominee has created some of the most memorable title sequences in recent memory for shows such as “Westworld,” “The Crown,” “Lovecraft Country,” and his two Emmy wins, “True Detective” Season 1 and “The Man in the High Castle.” But even someone as accomplished as Clair can’t rest on his laurels, not when streaming platforms have upended how viewers engage with their favorite shows.

“The ‘skip title’ button has completely changed what we do. And so we’re always competing against that idea of the ‘skip title’ button and how can we serve a show in a way that does the job of a title sequence, but it doesn’t drag down the pacing,” Clair tells Gold Derby in an exclusive video interview. So that was at least part of the challenge Clair and his team needed to overcome for the Apple TV+ show “,” the Scott Z. Burns limited series that presents a possible future upended by climate change. 

“This was a really interesting one because it wasn’t obvious at the start,” Clair says of the series. He was drawn to the show after having watched 2011’s “Contagion,” which Burns wrote for director Steven Soderbergh, in the early stages of the coronavirus pandemic.

“I’d always loved the film, but grew a very deep respect for Scott’s power of looking into the future and his commitment to using real data and real research as the basis for storytelling,” Clair says. “So a couple of years later, I heard that ‘Extrapolations’ was out there and we were very excited when we got the call from Scott’s team to start exploring some ideas for it.”

Told across eight episodes, “Extrapolations” is an anthology that covers 33 years of the Earth’s future, from 2033 through 2070. Over the span of the series, the climate gets worse – even as humanity’s innovation through technology exceeds all expectations. Clair’s title sequences are adjusted for each episode, with an infographic that extrapolates climate-related data points to match the theme of that segment.

“The show already goes to so many different places, that it didn’t make me feel right to sort of go to another place again at the start of each episode,” Clair says of the initial approach, which included bigger and more elaborate title sequences that featured statues and gods among other ideas. Rather than expand the world-building of the show within the titles, Clair went back to his background in infographics and animation. 

“I thought maybe there was the potential to do something really stripped back, elegant,” he says. 

The idea to animate the data was a boon for the show’s researchers too. “This was a place that they could put some statistics in the show without sort of running them down, without making it too dry, as just a little thing for the audience to say, ‘Here’s where we are.’”

“Extrapolations” is clear-eyed about the potential catastrophe that unchecked climate change could have on Earth within the next 50 years. But Clair says the show isn’t meant to be a period at the end of the sentence. “It’s not a prediction of the future, the future could go in many, many different directions. This is just one guess as to where this could go,” he says. “It was a lot of fun working with Scott’s team – they did the hard work of figuring out in relation to the universe of the show where these data points would be every year and every episode. The result is something that I think hopefully can be a good entryway into this very rich world.”

All episodes of “Extrapolations” are streaming on Apple TV+.

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