Designer
Kyle Cooper studied under Paul Rand at Yale, then took a graphic designer's rigor into an art form nobody was taking seriously. His scratchboard opening for Se7en turned studio credits into a serial killer's own confession, shot on film with tabletop photography that felt handmade because it was, and the sequence rewrote what a title card could do overnight. He built two companies around that instinct, Imaginary Forces and later Prologue Films, and kept pushing the same idea into mediums nobody expected: television, video games, teaser trailers. Hideo Kojima brought him back film after film because Cooper made every credit sequence feel like the first five minutes of a much bigger, much darker story, on Metal Gear Solid and twice now on Death Stranding. Three decades later his fingerprints are still the reason directors care what happens before the story starts.
Signature Traits
Major Works
Se7en (1995)
Typography scratched into scratchboard and shot on film, built from tabletop photography of a killer's own obsessive notebooks. The credits roll downward instead of climbing, a small inversion that still unsettles thirty years on.
Star Trek: Discovery (2017)
A constellation map redrawn as living circuitry, built to feel like Starfleet's own technical schematic rather than a broadcast graphic.
Metal Gear Solid 3: Snake Eater (2004)
A direct homage to 1960s Bond openings, silhouettes and hand lettering standing in for the jungle espionage the game is about to drop you into.
Death Stranding (2019)
Built for Kojima Productions' launch title and returned for the 2025 sequel, a working relationship now spanning two console generations.
Dawn of the Dead (2004)
Riot footage and hospital chaos cut into the credits themselves, the outbreak already fully underway before the film's first real scene begins.
