Simple brush strokes of paint on canvas tell a complicated story in Imaginary Forces’ main titles for HBO and Sky’s legal series, War.

Led by Emmy-nominated Creative Director Ronnie Koff, the sequence uses effects created in Procreate and Krita to make digital canvases feel like they were shot in-camera. The paint strokes seem to go to battle against each other as Imaginary Forces uses abstract expressionism to draw the viewer into the series’ intense emotions.

The idea is about as far away from the courtroom – a traditional stage for TV storytelling – as Koff and his team could get. 

“We wanted the sequence to feel like conflict distilled to its most elemental form,” said Koff in a statement. “Instead of showing lawyers, courtrooms or traditional imagery from the legal world, we wanted to visualize what happens when two opposing forces come up against one another.”

Across the sequence, forms collide, fracture, bleed and consume one another, creating compositions that exist somewhere between beauty and destruction. Moments of control give way to chaos, only to reorganize before collapsing again. The breakthrough came when the team began treating the abstraction more literally—not in what the audience sees, but in how the forms behave.

“We started thinking about the two sides almost like two boxers in a ring,” Koff said. “One advances, the other responds. They collide, separate and come back at each other. Once we started giving the paint that kind of intention, the abstraction suddenly had a story.”

That idea became the underlying choreography of the sequence, giving each gesture a sense of physicality and consequence while allowing the imagery to remain expressive and unpredictable.

“There’s something beautiful about abstract expressionism because you can feel aggression, tension and emotion without being told exactly what you’re looking at,” says Koff. “That felt like the right language for War. The title sequence isn't illustrating the conflict—it becomes the conflict.”

The series, which is a co-production between HBO and Sky, stars Dominic West and Sienna Miller as a tech mogul and his movie-star wife who have hired London’s highest-end lawyers to orchestrate their bitter divorce. War is created, written and produced by George Kay, who was behind such tension-filled series as Netflix’s Lupin and Apple TV’s Hijack.  

‍War premiered October 1 on HBO and October 2 on Sky in the UK as well as on the streaming service Now in the UK, Ireland and Italy, and on Sky and Wow in Germany, Switzerland and Austria.