2020-2022

SNL Opening Montage 46/47

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For nearly 50 years, Saturday Night Live has been a mainstay in American comedy culture. Each episode, just after the fourth wall breaks and "Live From New York, It's Saturday Night!" is exclaimed the names of the cast are announced accompanied by a visual montage, setting the tone for the show ahead. For the past couple of decades, Emily Oberman and team have designed this opening sequence. The first season I took part in was 46 in 2020. With the new opening, SNL wanted to recognize the extraordinary circumstances of the pandemic and show that NYC is still alive and ready to get through this.

We hand painted the logo, originally designed by Oberman in 2015, and the cast names are rendered in colorful, expressive hand-drawn type that fills space around their portrait––all of which is designed to give the open a personal and intimate feel at a time in all our lives we could use some human connection. Our team sketched studies of the various names to develop the different tableaus.

The lo-fi technique was partially inspired by the show’s opening titles in the 1970s, when the city was also weathering hard times and everyone pulled together. Those titles featured hand-painted montages by Edie Baskin that combined slow dissolves of stills with classic portraits of the cast. The new sequence reinvents the approach with imperfect handwriting in vibrant, punk rock colors layered on top.

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