opening titles for the series "unprincipled"

The title sequence for season five of the Russian comedy series "Unprincipled" was commissioned by the film company Mediaslovo in 2025. Production took us about three months — a fairly tight deadline that we managed to meet. Watch the titles on Kinopoisk or right here on our website. Below we explain how they were made.

Our task was to keep the overall style of the title sequences from previous seasons while making the characters brighter and more charismatic. So we paid special attention to the characters and spent a long time getting them approved with the client.

The animation was made in cut-out style — digital puppets built in software, split into body parts and then animated. This kind of animation speeds up the process considerably compared with "Disney-style" frame-by-frame animation. Naturally, it also affects the quality. But since the style of the series' titles is exactly that — playful, cardboard-like and angular, perfectly reflecting the idea of the "unreal" world of the characters — our choice fitted the overall picture perfectly.

We devoted a separate part of the work to 3D. We built the opening part of the titles from scratch — the task was to improve the look of Patriarch's Ponds made for previous seasons. We worked on the buildings more carefully and improved the composition and colour overall.

The last scene, where the characters played by Nikolai Fomenko and Kristina Babushkina drive away into the distance, was also made entirely in 3D. The houses were created from photographs of the real neighbourhood and based on the titles of other seasons. It was important for us and the client to get close to the look of the real buildings while still making them unique and cartoonish, and keeping the overall colour style. The result is eclectic and bright: recognisable, yet not quite ordinary Moscow streets.

We also spent a lot of time on the locations — we worked long on the backgrounds, detailing them right down to window cornices, brickwork, shop signs and plaques.

It was important for the client to have interesting transitions between locations and to work on the camera — we started on this at the animatic stage, a rough sketch of the camera. That is how we discussed and approved what the final image would look like: how we move from the restaurant to the shop of Irina Pegova's character, from a phone to the location where the characters of Pavel Tabakov and Aglaya Tarasova are running, and then on to the exhibition hall where Alexandra Rebenok's character is.

The series' signature cat was handled by a separate artist and animator. This part was done frame by frame — it was important for us to weave the cat organically not only into the story of the titles but also to match it with the final title card that appears in every season.

In the end, the titles were released together with season five of the series on Kinopoisk on 30 April 2026. Watch "Unprincipled"

and order animation from us.