Stiller & Meara I Nothing is Lost

We are incredibly proud to announce our collaboration with director Ben Stiller for Apple TV+’s documentary film: ‘Stiller & Meara: Nothing is Lost.’ 

This deeply personal and moving documentary explores the impact both on popular culture and at home of Ben’s parents the famous comedy duo Jerry Stiller and Anne Meara, where the lines between creativity, family, life and art often blurred. In the process, Ben turns the camera on himself and his family to examine Jerry and Anne’s enormous influence on their lives, and the generational lessons we all can learn from those we love.

Our prime focus was to bring to life Ben’s personal family archive with a complete GFX package consisting of titles, text treatments and audio visualisations. With a wealth of personal and professional photographs from the collection, we created a unified visual aesthetic across photo sequences which felt at once evocative of the time periods to which the images belonged and the world of the stage and screen that was the backdrop to Jerry and Anne’s lives and Ben and Amy’s childhood. We created a unique colour palette for professional photos from film and stage whilst developing a series of distinct looks to evoke the time periods of family photos from the 1930s to the 1970s through to the present day. Through the use of cinematic lens blurs, gently shimmering lights and 70s inspired split-screens, we immersed our photo sequences in the show business world of the time. Striving to authentically embed our graphics in the world of the 70s, we looked to analogue media to enhance our sequences, using a typewriter to create annotated scripts and filming own b-roll of a period accurate reel-to-reel tape machine as background to audio visualisations.

Working closely with Ben, we developed a typographic identity for our title treatments, subtitles and lower thirds which harked back to the fonts of 70s cinema, injecting them with light glows and diffusion along with analogue camera and film movements to lend them a subtle imperfection so that they felt as though they had been shot on film or projected.

We crafted an analogue title card for the film, hand-cutting the lettering for the titles to capture the DIY spirit of home movies of the era. We then filmed it on super 8 film which we had developed at Cinelab so that they felt seamlessly part of the world of Jerry and Anne’s home cinefilm footage.  

 Blue Spill delivered over 100 graphic sequences using an ACES workflow in Adobe After Effects and Autodesk Flame.