It was vital the film was inclusive, so Ginsburg set out to depict a “multitude of different types of breasts, using a vibrant color palette to communicate the diversity of skin tone,” she tells It’s Nice That. The film was hand-drawn in Photoshop using flat color and a range of brushes to add digital texture, such as splatter, ink, a noise brush to create veins and a pencil brush for details and “most importantly nipple hair!” then animated frame by frame, by the director and her team. Overall, Ginsburg says she wanted a rich, bold aesthetic so the film would be memorable, as it’s such an important message. “There are very joyful, uncomfortable, sad, and awkward moments in this film. I tried to heighten the emotional impact through the use of color, texture, and character design.”

The director’s morphing animation style allowed her to cover a wide range of shapes, sizes, and colors in a short space of time. “I love transitions. My work is extremely transition heavy, for me they never get old. I find them endlessly magic and mesmerizing.” The film also uses sweeping camera movements to make it “feel like one story” despite it being a montage of many scenes “morphing in and out of each other – from the breasts growing to change size, shape, and color to plucking a nipple hair which leads to many more sprouting in its place, to a mammogram, to a double mastectomy, to a nipple tassel sequence, to an awkward sex scene, to a majestic fertility scene, to saggy breasts becoming a scarf!”

I loved the tactile and tangible texture of Romare’s collages as well as its ability to present and juxtapose different subjects from multiple sources within a single composition. “The cutting, fragmenting, and reconstruction involved in creating a collage provides apt metaphors for the trauma and violence of war and political oppression, the evisceration of the status quo, and the piecing together of new societal forms” (Rachael DeLue).

The main title INTENTIONALLY reflects many of the techniques, aesthetics, and themes of Romare Bearden, and is a purposeful design for the opening credits of the series not meant to stand separately from its cinematic purpose. The true artist was Romare Bearden, and I was only an instrument. Yet, much like how the show adds hip hop and other modern flairs that are anachronistic to the time period portrayed in the show, our main title also utilizes modern artistic principles for better readability by a modern audience. The complexities of Romare’s collages, while appealing in its spellbinding intricacies, could prevent legibility of the credits or wouldn’t read as well when only shown for a brief moment within the fast-paced main title. Therefore, many of our Romare-inspired designs were simplified or redesigned in form and composition, from which similarities with modern and contemporary collages may have appeared in places. It is my hope that interest in the show and the main title will lead to a larger audience becoming newly aware of the artwork of Romare Bearden and other African-American artists.