Taking the title

Cohasset native wins Emmy for show's opening sequence

A year and a half ago, Cara McKenney took home the script of the pilot for the TV series "Mad Men" and thought she recognized a winner.

She was right. The script led to a great pilot and an award-winning hit TV series. The show also proved a winner for McKenney and her company, Imaginary Forces, which last month took home an Emmy Award for designing and producing the show's opening title sequence.

A Cohasset native who graduated from Milton Academy 10 years ago, McKenney concentrated on studio art in high school, and then majored in film at Middlebury College in Vermont. She studied American filmmaking of the cinematically adventuresome 1970s, watched a lot of films, and learned "everything is there for a reason."

"It's endlessly interesting. You don't just watch the movie. You study artistic choices such as how to use the camera."

Growing up in Cohasset, McKenney had a film lover's transformative experience of seeing all the factors that go into making a movie up close and personal when the Hollywood film "The Witches of Eastwick" was shot in her hometown.

"The production took over the entire town," McKenney said. She remembers thinking, "This is so cool."

Her parents still live in Cohasset. Her mother, Monica, is development director for MainSpring, the Hull multiservice center. Her father, Brian McKenney, is the managing partner for Beacon Investment Management in Boston.

Aside from being the home of fictional witches, Cohasset is a town with a beautiful coastline. "My memory of Cohasset is mostly based on riding a bicycle with a bathing suit and a life jacket," she said.

A recent weekend home to attend a wedding reminded her how beautiful the town is and "how lucky I was to grow up there," she said. "It's gorgeous."

With two main choices to pursue film and TV work, Los Angeles and New York City, she chose New York and has worked in film production there since graduating from Middlebury six years ago.

McKenney says filmmaking and TV production depend on contributions by many players such as the title production company she works for, Imaginary Forces, based in New York and LA.

"It's interesting to learn how collaborative this is," she says of the industry. Turning out a quality product "involves a lot of people."

Her team agreed to meet with "Mad Men's" creator, Matthew Weiner - who had been the executive producer and a writer for "The Sopranos" - and discovered he had definite ideas for the opening sequence for his show.

Picking up on these, the team's art codirectors, Steve Fuller and Mark Gardner, researched vintage ads from 1960 and chose a blocky, sans-serif typeface suggestive of the period for the printed titles.

Together, the team looked at liquor and airline ads aimed at customers who wanted to be seen as suave and sophisticated. "Sex was coming to the forefront," McKenney said.

McKenney, who has the title of producer, coordinated the design production, interacted with the client, and marshaled the pitch the team brought to Weiner and the network, AMC, which was venturing into dramatic TV series production for the first time with "Mad Men."

The series, which won the Emmy for best dramatic series, examines the divided souls of advertising executives at a time when Americans were shedding their postwar embrace of conservative conformity for a more experimental and pleasure-oriented approach to life.

The title design Imaginary Forces produced suggests a flattened animation-style treatment of a suited businessman, seen in silhouette, starting his day in the office. But the office falls away, the floor beneath him disappears, and the character free falls in a slow-motion, dreamlike fashion through the city and his world - as billboard ads of pretty girls and happy families pass by - and into his life.

"The character is falling through the urban landscape," McKenney said. The title sequence also suggests "the current state of culture and his emotional state."

Cut to television's big awards night last month - and an Emmy for Outstanding Main Title Design for McKenney, Fuller, and Gardner.

"It was one of the most creatively rewarding experiences for my team," McKenney said. And a challenging one - the title sequence had to incorporate the 30 legally required credits in 38 seconds.

Among other projects, her team is wrapping up two years of producing title sequences for Ted Koppel's Discovery documentary series, "Koppel on Discovery."

Imaginary Forces is also working on a title sequence for a film project with a particularly powerful "title legacy," McKenney said. The film is "Pink Panther 2," a revival of the Peter Sellers/Blake Edwards comedy series that made its animation title sequences classic film artworks in themselves.

Robert Knox can be contacted at rc.knox@gmail.com.