How the 'Westworld' main titles have evolved with each season to tell a new story

• HBO's main title sequence for "Westworld" season three was nominated for an Emmy award this year.
• Insider spoke with the title's designer, Patrick Clair, to learn more about the symbolism in this season's version of the opening credits.
• Warning: Spoilers ahead for season three of HBO's "Westworld."

"Westworld" main title designer Patrick Clair, whose previous work includes HBO's "True Detective," enjoys the fun challenge of creating the ever-evolving opening credits sequence for Jonathan Nolan and Lisa Joy's sci-fi series. Especially since he knows the "Westworld" fanbase is eager to see which new themes emerge with every new season.

"It's a big deal for us to take 90 seconds of the audience's time at the start of each episode," Clair told Insider over the phone from his home in Australia. "We try not to get too concerned about the details of the plot. [We're] more concerned about what's bubbling down beneath. That way it gets more interesting as the season goes on."

This year, Clair was among the Emmy nominees for outstanding main title design with "Westworld" season three. Insider spoke with the designer about the new thematic elements in the third season's opening credits, and how they connect back to the story of "Westworld."

The main theme of 'Westworld' season 3 focused on freedom and the consequences that can come with self-discovery

"My goal as a title designer is to try and make a sequence that people don't feel like skipping," Clair said.

A major part of that is adding new elements to the title design with each passing season, which engages fans in speculation over the meaning of new imagery.

"If you're wrestling with the same themes that the characters are wrestling with, then you can draw all sorts of meanings from what you're seeing," Clair said. "And that's what makes it really interesting, right? You're trying to guess, 'Well where are they leading me?'"

Clair has crafted the main titles for all three seasons of "Westworld" so far, and he says the process is usually the same. He only enters the process after all the scripts have been written, and often after Nolan and Joy have finished filming the main bulk of the season. Then Clair sits down with the showrunners to discuss what the season is all about.

"And I don't necessarily mean what the plot points are, but it's really more what is going on fundamentally at the heart of the show," Clair said. "What themes are they tackling and, most importantly, what are the journeys of the key characters?"

In the first season, the core theme was the way the hosts were learning to feel love and a yearning for freedom or companionship. That led Clair and his team to create the "android-lovers" who featured prominently in the main titles. In the second season, Clair wanted to highlight the relationship between Maeve and her daughter. A woman-host holding a child was added in season two's main titles.

"Then we got to season three, and based on these conversations with Jonah [Nolan] is seems to me that it was about people trying to strike out and find their freedom," Clair said. "[Trying] to find their own voice and come to understand themselves, and also deal with this push and pull between companionship and competition."

That led to a few key pieces of new imagery for season three's main titles. The first is the humanoid figure who is reaching up towards a second figure.

"[They're] thinking that they're reaching out to find a companion," Clair said. "And just as they get there, they break through the surface and the illusion is destroyed. They realize that not only were they alone, but that in ascending to this new plane they're leaving a part of themselves behind."

After the figure breaks through the surface, we see a host sinking back down in the water as its face breaks open.

Clair also built upon this theme of reaching for freedom with what he referred to as "a riff on the Icarus myth."

Icarus is a figure from Greek mythology. As the legend goes, Icarus's father Daedalus crafted him a set of wings using wax and feathers, allowing him to escape from prison. Daedalus warned Icarus not to fly too high because the heat from the sun would melt the wax. But Icarus did not heed his father's warnings and flew higher and higher until his wings were scorched. He fell into the sea and drowned.

In the season three credits, Clair designed "an eagle taking flight in this bizarre, jet-powered wind tunnel."

"Ultimately it flies too close to the sun, so to speak," Clair said. "It gets torn apart as it's soaring through."

He says the bird is meant to be in the same abstract, host-making space as the figures from season one and two's credits, like the horse or buffalo. He wanted it to be flying in a simulation wind tunnel. But instead of the logical wind turbine moving the air, Clair placed a jet-engine in front of the bird.

"And of course that jet turbine is going to then destroy the thing in the wind tunnel," Clair said. "That seemed to have the very Westworld-feeling loop of the perversity of technology and fate and contradictions."

The juxtaposition between a dandelion and the structure of Rehoboam was a link to the theme of determinism and fate

Throughout season three, Dolores and her new human comrade Caleb are at war against a company that uses an AI system named Rehoboam to control every facet of life on Earth. Clair wanted to play on the theme of fate, and the question about the world being deterministic as opposed to a place of free will.

"We got to take this cool, very alien thing — the spherical AI that's utterly inhuman — and then weave that in with a very human symbol of the dandelion," Clair said. "And this idea of our fates being as random as dandelion petals blowing in the breeze and scattering in the winds. Those very petals of the dandelions coalesce into the blinking lights of Rehoboam."

A real AI system generated a key image used in this year's main titles

For the first time this year, Clair partnered with an AI researcher — Dr. Pinar Yanardag Delul, the founder of a creative lab called A.I. Fiction. Dr. Delul developed an AI algorithm that was shown "every image from 'Westworld," meaning the first two full seasons.

"The algorithm can then basically spit out its dream-like, surreal impressions of what the Westworld park looks like," Clair said. "And you get these amazing, surreal results of distorted, faces, shapes that in one moment they look like a huge rocky outcrop from Monument Valley but then the next moment you realized it was the leg of a host in the saloon."

You can watch a process of what the AI's "dreams" about "Westworld" look like in the below video:

from on Vimeo.

Once they had the images from the AI, Clair found the perfect place for it in the new main title sequence.

For the previous two seasons, Clair had always used one item that was "really important and complex, and it's usually reflective and spherical." In season one, it was an eyeball reflecting the mountain landscape of the Westworld park. In season two, it was a control unit pearl ("the soul and brain of the host," as Clair called it) reflecting the Japanese-inspired landscape of Shogun World.

"In season three we thought it'd be cool to have a cell dividing, which is a reference to the artificial meat, and these questions of, 'What are we really? Are we just meat at the end of the day, or are we something more serious?'" Clair said.

The AI-generated image appears in the reflection of the dividing cell, as you can see below:

"You see this kind of impressionistic set of blurs that could be some Cowboys or some mountains — you're not quite sure," Clair said. "It's literally an artificial-intelligence algorithm's dreams of 'Westworld.'"

Clair hopes to explore the potential of this AI-generated imagery more with the process of making season four's main titles.

Season 3 was also the first time a bold color appeared anywhere in the 'Westworld' main titles

For Clair, the final motif of the "Westworld" main titles is important to the overall sequence.

"Each season we want to do something bold with it that that really speaks to what's going on with the characters," Clair said. "Season one was a version of 'dust-to-dust' — 3D printed liquid to 3D printed liquid. There was this idea of the host playing the piano and realizing that its loop had been closed, and it could fall back into the ether."

"Then season two was really about them rising up, as opposed to sinking down," Clair said. They're coming out of the liquid, rising up from the dark waters in this rebellion-type theme."

"Then for this season, it's really [about] that brutal and bloody conflict between the hosts," Clair said.

Throughout season three, there is a lot of in-fighting among the remaining hosts. Dolores and Maeve are at odds for most of the season, and then Dolores is also battling her own copied self in the form of Charlotte Hale. By the season finale, the original Dolores was left effectively dead, with plenty of carnage in her wake.

That's where the vivid red color comes in. Clair says the red liquid we see a drone-host sink into "could be blood," but that's not the only reason for the color.

"In some ways, it's a little bit inspired by some references we found of human ears being grown in a lab on substrates of 3D printed bedding, and they're in this vivid pink liquid," Clair said.

In 2016, the New York Times published images of ears created with an "integrated tissue and organ printing system." You can see those photos here.

The red served an even more meta purpose, too. Because the audience was used to the muted, mainly black-and-white palate of the "Westworld" credits, the addition of bright red at the end would have come as a surprise when fans first sat down to watch the first episode of season three. Clair imagined people sitting at home with the lights off, bathed in "expected" pale light.

"And then you get to that shot and your whole room just goes blood-red," Clair said. "I love that feeling of starving the audience of color, and then just injecting something really bold."

The use of red also took advantage of newer TV-watching technology.

"I'm just old enough to remember the time when in broadcast design, you couldn't use red because it would bleed too much," Clair said. "You couldn't have had that kind of shot in the '90s, or at least you'd be discouraged from it. So now it's kind of scratching an itch from back when my lecturers at film school would tell me to reduce the saturation."

So where might the main titles go for the coming fourth season of "Westworld"? Clair and his team don't know yet, but they are aware of the high bar they've set for themselves.

"Honestly at this point, we're just terrified of trying to come up with something as impactful for season four," Clair said. "As a fan of Crichton's work going back to the original 'Westworld' [movie], the idea of getting to work on this new version of it with such a sprawling scale is a career highlight for me. I cannot wait to see where they're going to take the world next."

You can tune into the upcoming Emmy Awards, in which Clair is nominated for best main title design, on September 20 on ABC.

"Westworld" season three is available to watch as part of an HBO Max subscription. You can sign up here for $14.99 per month. (When you subscribe to a service through our links, we may earn money from our affiliate partners.)

• Read more:
• The 'Westworld' production design team reveals the backstory to key details you might have missed in season 3
• 'Westworld' writers Jonathan Nolan and Denise Thé shed light on Dolores' fate in the season 3 finale
• 31 questions left unanswered after the 'Westworld' season 3 finale
• 13 details you might have missed in the season three finale of 'Westworld'