The movie opens on Thornton’s Charlie Farmer character, who’s
first seen in the distance as a lone figure on horseback, riding across a
lunar-like Texas landscape dressed in his NASA suit, trying to rescue a runaway
calf.
The main title is divided into a series of these strong
images, and Picture Mill creative director says the studio wanted to
exploit the dreamlike cinemascope imagery that opens the film. Low, wide
typography hangs on the horizon as Farmer rides through the countryside in his
spacesuit. The type appears to be made from the same polished steel and
aluminum as a rocket.
The end titles were designed by Picture Mill art director Brad
Berling and include a blend of stills and live action that open with an
overlapping and layered collage of made-up news and entertainment magazine
covers, Polaroid snapshots, and a sequence of a homecoming parade, shot in a
news B-roll style. Also included is a staged Jay Leno interview with the
hometown hero.
“The filmmakers wanted us to keep the story going right to
the very end, and it was challenging to work with the range of different
material that we had to integrate in the sequence, including the Jay Leno footage,
which was shot in HD,” notes Berling.
“To better fit that interview into the title and make it more filmic, we
color-corrected the HD footage, enlarged and repositioned the video, painted in
fake backgrounds, and added dark falloff to the edges so that the end title crawl would not be rolling over their
faces.”