It took 20 hours of raw footage to make the one minute opening sequence of TNT’s Animal Kingdom.

While it mostly consists of a tattoo needle in slow motion, you might catch a glimpse of Domico Watson eating a hot dog.

It wasn’t a lark. The Bermudian motion graphics designer was then working at Chicago video production company Sarofsky. The Animal Kingdom intro was on his biggest project.

“They wanted to tell a story through a tattoo. We got a lot of shots. One thing I had to do was eat a hot dog. Everything was shot in slow motion for the sake of the title sequence.

“When I look back at the footage it was me chomping down aggressively on this hot dog, the juice going everywhere. [There was a] close-up of my mouth; I looked like an animal,” the 23-year-old recalled.

He spent a year as a junior designer with Sarofsky, joining the company soon after he graduated from Savannah College of Art and Design. After the summer he will move to London, England to continue his career.

“I pretty much went for it and applied for the big companies and out of those big companies, Sarofsky got back to me,” he said.

“It’s basically graphic design but in motion, so it’s applied to animation, visual effects and a bit of cinematography.”

He was pondering his career path at university when found a way to fuse his two loves: art and Disney films.

“MOME Love is a huge club made up of people from the motion media major and those who aren’t in the major who are interested in it.

“I got to the meeting and [suddenly] found my major.

“It kind of happened overnight. Before I knew it I was hooked on it,” he said.

“The biggest thing was the James Bond titles. I watched all of them.”

At Sarofsky, he remembers wheeling around the open workspace on scooters and playing darts.

“Commercials, logo animations, and then the title sequences of movies are the big thing that everyone wants to do,” he said. “It’s a very fun environment. It helps our creativity too because you’re not sitting in a box being forced to think about stuff.”

Despite his sausage moment, his influence on the Animal Kingdom sequence won’t be apparent to the untrained eye.

“The biggest thing I spent time on was editing the footage. On one full weekend me and two tower designers sat there and added the full graphic treatment to title sequence. I got to animate the typography that you see on screen, which is the titles.

“For this, I took a traditional typeface and pretty much had it constantly cutting and it would change from a serif to a sans serif very quickly, your eye would barely notice it.”

During his time in Chicago he also worked on the end credits for Disney’s latest Marvel movie, Captain America: Civil War.

“There he got a true taste for the “pitch process”.

Mr Watson cut his teeth on a commercial for the Olympic Association in 2012.

“My mum [Donna Raynor] is the president of the [Bermuda National Athletics Association]. She knew I had an interest in commercials, but she didn’t know how good I was at it. At the time all I knew was how to edit photos together so I literally took photos of all the athletes and co-ordinated it with the music. I started learning myself and school was where I picked up the heavy mechanics of it.”

Growing up, the only child would draw constantly. Horses and tennis featured heavily. He and his graphic designer father, Michael Watson, would have competitions to see who could draw best.

“I would try to out-draw him to the point where, when I got older, I wanted to keep at arts and graphic design. That was the starting point for me.”

He credits his mother for his drive: “She’d say you can do stuff in the arts you just have to choose the right field. In particular, she pushed trying to go for stuff that’s different.

“Things that there’s a market for but no one would expect.”

He said his career won’t keep him away from Bermuda for long. “In the future I would love to start up something. Get a lot more experience and have the context internationally. Almost working off what Erin [Sarofsky] did. She was from Chicago and happened to find her way back home eventually.”