We carefully studied the images suggested by the director, using them as a starting point in our brainstorming. These were images somehow connected with the narrative of the film - the statue of Themis, the dump, callous construction sites against the background of the St. Petersburg architectural heritage, as well as scandalous wealth and luxury. This was not an imposed obligation, but only offered as a starting point. We wanted to avoid just a "contemplative" narrative by showing only beautiful spectacular symbols, so we needed to find an idea and to subordinate everything to a single plan and dramaturgical logic. That was our main goal.

Initially, the Plague was conceived as a black liquid flowing limply down a megasculpture, but later we decided to endow it with will and character, to give it the opportunity to move in the desired direction and to have intricate choreography.

It was very important to make the plague dangerous, unstoppable, but not vile and disgusting. Another task was to distance ourselves from the "Venom" effect, since these films were released at about the same time, so we decided to make the plague of a more discrete, "rocky" entity.

The White Bird is a symbol of the gentle and bright soul of the dying city, trying to escape from the raging chaos. We originally conceived it as a realistic seagull, but later it was reborn into a luminous silhouette - a more poetic, gentle and immaterial image.

We invented and created such a sculpture from scratch: an indifferent man surrounded by naked girls. If you look at it carefully, it becomes clear that the man, despite the fact that he is in the center of everything, is left to himself — no one pays attention to him, and he does not pay attention to anyone.

Due to the 12+ rating of the film, we had to literally "cut corners" and remove all the "adult" anatomical details from the sculpture, nevertheless, the composition, in our opinion, acquired even more eroticism because of this.

In addition, at the very last moment, we came up with the idea to completely depersonalize a man by adding a mask to his face.

Initially, dogs were assigned a more significant role in the plot of the opener, but later we abandoned this, for the sake of simplicity and purity of the story, and left them with a nuance, in the form of sculptures at the dump. And the only animate object in the titles remained a bird.

Another idea was to "dump" the objects of the historical architectural heritage of St. Petersburg, thus another colorful metaphor found literal embodiment in the opener.

А few early dump concepts:

The atmosphere in the opener plays a very important role in creating the right mood, but it was especially crucial to implement in the general plans — to build a deep, artistic, balanced frame with the help of a heavy smoky atmosphere.

The landscape for Plague Doctor is a mirror image of Megasculpture in a distorted form. We decided to make it stone, rocky, like the Plague itself, from which it was formed.

One of the early concepts is the headshot of Plague Doctor, with crazy empty eye sockets. This image was abandoned, since the Doctor's canonical image in the comics does not imply its frontal image, being an unfavorable angle.

In order to preserve the imagery, we also decided to make Plague Doctor of the same material as the Plague that gave birth to both him and the landscape. It turned out to be a rocky gloomy sculpture, the antipode of Themis.

This is an early sketch of Plague Doctor. Despite the fact that the Doctor's face had already been worked out in detail, at the very end of the production the director decided to put the doctor completely into the dark so that it wouldn't be possible to make out the details, only the silhouette. It was done in order not to destroy the mystery ahead of time.

Some work-in-progress stuff — the birth of Plague Doctor: