We witness icons of the Wild West world being formed inside a lab. This feels like a dance, a grand balletic expression of creation. A horse gallops in slow motion across a vast landscape, a cowgirl sits high atop it, her hair streaming in the wind while a six shooter is aggressively pointed forwards. Two lovers embrace in a dark room, the surfaces that face each other are soft and seductive, while their extremities are half formed and grotesquely revealed. We see a saloon pianist, playing a familiar tune... but as he himself is weaved, the piano takes over his tune - an automaton itself. He is rendered redundant, and as "ash-to-ash" and "dust-to-dust" he returns to the milk bath from whence he came... his final loop complete.

We intended to create a sequence that drew on real, three dimensional photographic style depictions of the objects from this world. However, the sets had been struck. We needed something with subtlety and nuance in lighting and texture, we didn’t want to rely on illustration or graphic techniques. So, we created everything in 3D CGI. The challenge was render times, we had only a few weeks to produce the final animations. We explored the emerging field of GPU rendering – where specialized graphical processing chips take over the job of traditional CPUs. These created beautiful light effects and stunning textures, in record time. While the team developed the creative approach, we also developed a pipeline whereby many of these new GPUs could run in special parallel arrays – accelerating render time and creative potential to make the sequence a photographic style reality.

The sequence became an iconic part of Westworld’s presence. The show itself got strong reviews (89% on Rotten Tomatoes) and became massively popular. The titles have received coverage through-out the design press, but also garnered mentions throughout mainstream and entertainment media (The Guardian, Vulture, Collider, Quartz, TV Guide, etc…). The real impact is seeing the visual cues echo in emerging trends across the industry.