WHEN cinema-goers flock to see the follow-up to horror smash movie Silence Of The Lambs next week the first thing they see will be the work of a lad from East Lancashire.

Director Nick Livesey dreamed up and filmed the title sequence for "Hannibal" the follow-up to the 1991 film, starring Sir Anthony Hopkins.

The introduction shows Hannibal Lecter, the psychiatrist with a penchant for eating his patients, slowly makes his way along a piazza in Florence a flock of pigeons becomes agitated and hastily fly away.

In mid-flight they form the shape of a face -- Lecter's -- and at the very moment the face is formed, they scare themselves and fly away.

Nick, originally from Great Harwood but now based in London, took time out from his schedule to explain to the Lancashire Evening Telegraph the inspiration behind it.

Speaking from New York, where he is currently promoting the film, the 28-year-old said: "Lecter's dangerous and cheeky character reminded me of the Grizzly Bear. Apparently, when you hunt the grizzly, he plays clever tricks on you by laying false tracks and before you know it, the grizzly is behind you. The hunter then becomes the hunted. That is the basic idea of the titles."

Nick, whose dad Peter owns Queen Street Estate Agents in Great Harwood, works for film company Ridley Scott Associates (RSA) as a director of commercials and has shot title sequences for other films including Plunkett & MacLeane, starring Robert Carlyle.

The former pupil St Gabriel's Primary School, Brownhill, and St Wilfrid's Secondary School in Blackburn, studied art at Blackburn College before taking a HND course in Somerset. At 19 he successfully applied to the Royal College of Art in London to study a Masters even though he had no degree. When he graduated three years later he was the youngest graduate in the college's history. On leaving he was quickly snapped up by a company in New York where he worked for a year before getting his big break with RSA.

When the idea for Hannibal struck him in Christmas 1999 he didn't even tell director Ridley Scott. He said: "I wanted to shoot a test to see if it was going to work and this test actually became the final piece. When I sent it to Ridley Scott, who was on the last week of the Hannibal filming, he hadn't seen or known anything about this prior to receiving the tape and putting it in the machine. Fortunately, he liked it."

A staring image of Hannibal Lecter which Nick shot, adorns every film poster and CD cover for the soundtrack.

Nick's work certainly sounds glamourous but he said there are down sides.

He said: "At five in the morning I left my room in Florence to scatter pastries over the huge piazza. A few revellers looked rather perplexed then I went back to my room to wait for the birds to appear. An hour later, a sole pigeon circled and landed and before long there were about 500 pigeons slowly moving around the piazza.

"I filmed them for five hours but it was imperative that I got some flight footage of the birds for my final shot so, after much deliberation, I ran through them like a madman. Luckily it worked."