Anatomy of a Spot: ‘Teen Wolf’

01.21.2016

The first half of Teen Wolf's fifth season ended last summer with a lot of intriguing loose ends, not the least of which involved a mysterious painting of two beasts fighting each other. Hidden behind a wall smashed down by Season 5A's primary villains, the Dread Doctors, the painting of a hell hound and an alpha wolf would go on to inspire another, even more ambitious, high-art-themed campaign for Season 5B:

Dubbed "Is this What Love Looks Like" after the Mirel Wagner song that provides its soundtrack, the Teen Wolf promo above is unique for being utterly static.Â

The camera moves of course, but the image does not. It's not an animation spot done in a painterly style; the spot is the painting, a Baroque-style nightmare (seen at top) depicting what appears to be a pile of beautifully rendered corpses. But as the promo's camera movements reveal, there is much more to this work of art than just dead bodies. To say nothing of the six main-character sections to which the spot draws the eye, the painting is an intricately layered puzzle carefully calculated to spark maximum fan engagement. It's an endlessly viewable artifact packed with discoveries ranging from "homages to past seasons to clues for the new season," said Joe Ortiz, SVP of strategy and brand creative for MTV. "There's even a clue for next season, season 6, that's hidden in there."

While the term "Easter egg" is relatively new to today's vernacular, Baroque paintings were giving viewers something like them hundreds of years ago.Â

"That gothic tradition was really perfect for this piece because it has violence and beauty," Ortiz said. "It has a grandeur of scale, and there are really rich story and character details within those big frescos."

For artist Jon Foster, who illustrated the painting at his studio in Rhode Island, the centuries-old pieces that inspired the Teen Wolf promo are "just great artwork. The quality of the painting," he said. "The training of the artists at the time in terms of anatomy, composition, lighting… The body language that you see - there's a lot of drama to it, and a lot of storytelling with that body language… It's beautiful work. It's captivating."

The painting's journey began with a sketch by MTV art director Ted McGrath, seen above. Though crude, it provided the bones for Foster to flesh out, including the main-character anchor points in the painting that would dominate the ensuing promo. Foster's elegant, haunting style has previously graced, among other things, the title sequence for HBO's The Leftovers, season 1, using a similar departure into Renaissance imagery that was almost overpowering in its depiction of humanity in strife. But while the style of painting was, said Foster, "familiar from researching for the Leftovers intro piece," he still had to do a great deal of research, with help from his girlfriend Lindsay, to get caught up on the show's tangled web of back story and references.

"A lot of the mythology is real mythology," he said, "monsters and ghosts and creatures of different cultures. A lot of that stuff interests me a great deal."

On their end, the MTV team's research included a field trip to New York's Metropolitan Museum of Art, where they "spent a lot of time in the Medieval and French Romantic wings," Ortiz said. "We wanted this to feel like a real painting that would be up on any gallery wall."

Ironically, though the painting recalls ancient methods, Foster utilized state-of-the art digital technology to create it.Â

"Just the sheer scope of the project, and moving things around compositionally and color and likenesses - if I had to try to and do that traditionally with oil and brush, I probably would have needed a year," he said.Â

Instead, he had a mere 21 days to turn the work around, "one of the toughest deadlines that I've ever worked on." To speed things up, he employed Zbrush, a 3D program that helped him sculpt and light the dozens and dozens of corpses, moving them around "so I could get hundreds of figures intertwined and on top of each other." Photoshop facilitated most of the actual painting, color work and scaling, and a program called Corel Painter allowed him to mimic the grainy textures of real paint.

"It would get away from that Baroque feel with too much Photoshop and not enough of a feel of texture and brush marks," Foster said.

There were also the Easter eggs to contend with, a list of more than 100 details that infiltrated nearly every section of the painting. Incorporating these elements, however, which range from Coach Bobby Finstock's whistle to the villains known as skinwalkers, was hardly a chore for Foster.Â

"All of them were interesting and fun because in every section you really did have a little bit of a story," he said. "I liked them all because it gave me something to think [while] painting those areas and figures."

An early version of Foster's painting shows a different composition to the corpse-pile.

Once finished, it was up to Ortiz's team to showcase the painting in a spot, and get fans salivating.Â

"We wanted to use a disruptive camera move to really emphasize the visceral horror and kind of the inherent danger in the piece," Ortiz said. "We wanted to use the movement to really focus the viewer's eyes on the enormous amount of details that were in the fresco. We really wanted the fans to study the piece like they would a painting."

The camera's rapid shifts and rack-focusing create the illusion of moving a magnifying lens around the painting, or swapping out sections of it as slides under a microscope. Throughout it all, a subtle shadow creeps ever-closer from corners of the frame. Shot practically to get a reference point, the shadow was then recreated using After Effects, and is a subtle nod to what Ortiz called "the inspiration point for the entire campaign": the Season 5A finale painting depicting the two demons locked in their terrible struggle.

The final layer in the promo's chilling effect, Mirel Wagner's "What Love Looks Like," was the perfect choice for how it "juxtaposed the visceral terror of the scene with the story of Teen Wolf for this season," Ortiz said: "The shattering of the pack. So all their love and friendships have been torn apart. The understated heartbreak of the lyrics and of the song really nailed it for us, and once we found that, it really brought the whole piece together."

With the third episode of Season 5B airing Tuesday, Foster's painting and the promo that features it have already received ample scrutiny. When it was announced that fan favorite Crystal Reed would be returning in Season 5 for a guest spot, for instance, a particularly clued-in follower was able to pair the image of Reed's costume that accompanied the announcement with one of the painting's Easter eggs.

"That's what's so beautiful about the conversation we have with fans in this piece," said Ortiz. "It's not just a piece of creative for the season, but it really becomes something they can reference throughout the entire season and story."