According to the series' executive producer Gregg D. Fienberg, the open needed "to carry off some sort of a sense of exuberance without trying to explain in any way what the essence of the show was about. A David Milch show shifts and grows along the way and any attempt in a main title to convey more than a feeling would most likely go off the rails sometime during the life of the series. Ultimately, even though our show seems very dark and dreary at first, at its core is a celebration of the exuberance of life. Angus and his team captured that."
Wall pulled tons of surfing stock footage and the production team shot Super 8. Andy Hall of design company A52 spent a few days in San Diego shooting a surfer on 35mm to round out the palette. RPS editor David Brodie did much of the culling and cutting. As the sequence came together, David Milch's suggestion of the music track "Johnny Appleseed" from Joe Strummer and the Mescaleros formed the backbone, uniting the new footage with stock images and surf footage licensed from surf films such as Bruce Brown's 1966 documentary, Endless Summer.
A52 Inferno artist Raul Ortego treated the finished edit to give it a vintage look, and also added the text titles. Telecine was handled at Riot in Santa Monica.