To capture the feelings of polarity, conflict, and tension in the title sequence for War, the HBO legal drama about a fictional, high-stakes divorce case, designers created an animation that captures conflict through clashing colors.

Imaginary Forces, the acclaimed production studio behind title sequences for Stranger Things, Mad Men, and the 2026 Milan Cortina Games, as well as War, wanted to express the visceral nature of the show’s namesake in a way that felt abstract and impressionistic. To do that, they used black, white, and red paints animated in splotchy, splattered, and kinetic brush strokes that move like they’re battling on screen. Considering the characters’ extreme wealth, the idea of playing with art to do that felt like a natural way to show it.

War is set in London and stars Dominic West as the founder of a fictional social media site, Zephyr, and Sienna Miller as his wife, a movie star whose new film is a period drama called The Milliner. Their ensuing divorce descends, as the title suggests, into an all-out, winner-take-all battle.

“We did a lot of tests internally,” Ronnie Koff, creative director at Imaginary Forces, says of the creative development process. After starting with physically painting on glass, they pivoted to digital paint brushes on the Procreate iPad app so they could iterate faster. Initially, they were inspired by the mid-twentieth-century expressionist Franz Kline , who painted abstract brushstrokes to capture emotion through line quality and positive and negative space.

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