Art of Title Design

People remember films from opening title sequences, this is how many people describe and recognize films.

Titles in silent films

Words and letters were the biggest part of this type of film, they had to provide essential information for the viewer because of such things as ease of production. This was usually provided by white letters on black backgrounds. In addition to hiring lettering artists, the biggest film studios began to employ typesetters in the production of title cards.

Titles with music

Movies got more popular and producer started to invest more money into sounds with the titles. For example the dog they liked to convey the tone of a movie through the dressage of its main title. For example black and red letters conveyed horror. Hollywood animation studios, including Warner Brothers and MGM, did give some license to their artists to indulge in title antics. Disney took it upon themselves to put the characters into the title sequence.

The birth of title sequences

In 1950 Saul Bass, Pablo Ferro, Maurice Binder and Richard Williams At that time, independent filmmakers made commercial headway by doing things differently, spreading utterly fresh ideas about the possibilities of title sequences. This is the era in which the discipline of film title sequence design was actually born. Experimentation on the fringes, where title sequences really thrive, have led to all kinds of innovation.

The Modern era of film titling

Every film title has been effected in some way by computers this is excellent for designers. Creating film titles means participating in the apprenticeship tradition continued The revolutionary title sequence for “Se7en” (1995) by Kyle Cooper was named by New York Times Magazine as “one of the most important design innovations of the 1990s”: The potential of digital graphics and typography has attracted some of the most creative minds to motion design. Pixar and Disney have reserved crucial parts in the branding of their films for the title sequences, using animated character to represent the film.

Conclusion

Over the years the titles for movies has changed due to the fact that fashion has changed, however the value of the title has stayed the same as it has always been used for the same reasons. The only difference that you can see clearly is that titles get more creative over the years.

Pete Fraser's Blog Planning and Ideas.

Ideas

Planning is the biggest stage of the production, its best to have a record for all the planning that happens. Story boards are the best way of getting the planning easily across. We need to do a visual plan also. With the storyboard, we need to do get across the location of the camera, how long it last and any music. Feedback on the storyboard and ideas can be vital and can bring about lots of improvements.

Planning

Keep the ideas simple. If the idea gets to complex then there is more likely to be more problems, recently The Film Council awarded cash to four young scriptwriters who pitched their thriller, horror or comedy movie ideas in 25 words or less. This 25word approach was raised last year. Research for this kind of project really means getting a full understanding of what the task involves by looking properly at real examples and at examples done by previous media students.

Evaluation

If you keep your Idea simple and focus on how you shoot the film, you will find the whole project easier hence Peter saying 'keep it simple'. If you plan well than your less likely to encounter problems when you are filming, 'Planning is the biggest stage of the production'.

Sound tracks

I have been researching soundtracks, getting an idea for the music we could use in our film. For the opening scene of our film we wanted music that would build tention as the camera is zooming out from Georges (the actor that is playing our main character) face and then stop imediatly when it cuts to black at the start of the montage. I've listened through many OST's and the following I have liked enough to get several songs from iTunes. Sunshine, American Beauty, Lost Highway, Requiem for a Dream, Inception, Pulp Fiction, The Social Network, Trainspotting and Misfits (TV series). The music used in these varies greatly. Some films have a soundtrack specially made, they can be made of orchestras (e.g. Sunshine, Inception, Lord of The Rings), electronic music is also used (Social Network, TRON legacy).

Notable film composers:
- Clint Mansell
- Ennio Morricone
- Hanz Zimmer
- John Murphy
- Thomas Newman
- Trent Reznor

For our project of making a film opening to work we agreed that we would have to be organised, therefore we have made a plan of when we are going to plan, make and edit our film opening. 

Monday-Thursday

• Decide on our storyline, so far this has been our main problem. We have a start and an ending but the middle is still do be decided, we are finding it hard to make up a realistic middle that isn't to confusing.
• Where we are going to film, as the start of the project is going to be mainly a montage of our main characters day we decided to do it mostly at my house, we also managed to turn my dads studio into a torture scene.
• What Props we are going to need, apart from the normal household items for the montage we had to find the right props for the torture scene, things like tools and the chair our main character is going to sit on are very important.
• Extra research into what techniques we can use, thing like how montages are normally displayed in films, they way they are editted and how long the clips are.

Friday

• Film the opening torture scene, this will take a while to get the lighting and the camera angle right.
• Experiment with props, seeing which kinda of chair looked like it would fit more into a torture scene and which tools would be behind the character hanging on the wall to give  

Saturday

• Review all of our progress so far, possibly looking at what we could improve on.
• Finish our filming 

Sunday 

• Research music, seeing if we can find a good tension building sound track for our opening scene

This is a section of the story board we wrote.

  The gist of the story is a man witnesses someone being tortured on a webcam chat website (e.g. chatroulette.com) and has to save them.

   The film will start with a shot of the protagonist tied to a chair himself having been tortured, with the camera slowly zooming out to reveal that this is actually on a webcam. Cut to black and title at the bottom of the screen stating its the day before, we hear an alarm. The black will fade away as if it is from the POV of someone waking up, he will turn the alarm off. We get a montage of his daily activities- eating breakfast, brushing teeth, cycling to school, a lesson etc. He comes home, goes on chatroulette and come across a person being tortured. He calls the police but they disregard it, they think that it is a hoax. He uses his skills with computers to find out where the victim is held and goes to save him.

Film openings that relate to ours

Inception -

Unfortunately I can't find the opening scene from Inception because it's not out on film yet. But the idea of the film starting off in the past is something we want to incorporate into our film, for instance, in Inception the main character wakes up having been washed up on a beach, he then goes inside a house and meets the older version of the man he's been working with for the whole film. Like Inception, we want to start the film off with the main character in the position of the person he see's on his webcam and then you would watch the rest of the film to find out why and how he gets himself into this position. The reason we decided to do this was because it gives us a chance to use a lot of different camera shots.

Pictures of the places we are going to be filming the start of our film.

This will be the road that we will use for the main character to cycle down at the start of the film on his way to school. We chose it because its a nice road and its fairly quiet so we won't be interrupted when trying to film. 

This is the spare room in my house and will be used as the protagonists bedroom. It will be used for the scenes in which he wakes up near the start of the film and when he gets onto the webcam and find the other character.

This is my dads studio, the reason we are going to use this is because we needed a warehouse looking place and this is the closest thing we could think of. Fortunately we won't be showing the outside of it, only the inside for some dark scenes.

This will be the wall the character that is being held hostage will be sat against, the reason we chose this as the  place the character will be sitting is because of the tools and all the mess behind it, we wanted to make it so you don't see the torture but it is implied by the fact that there is a lot of dirty tools in the back ground and the fact that the character looks a little beaten up.

Another reason we decided to choose the studio at my house was because of this large window which is opposite the wall that the character will be sat against, our idea was to shine a light through it so it creates a dim, dirty light that would show a little bit of the character sat in the dark room or hang a light from the ceiling and swing it so you only catch glimpses of the character sat on the chair.