RESEARCH: ART OF THE TITLE

Explore the title sequences. Notice the text below the video clip, as it often offers you valuable insight into the title design. 

You will be analysing three of these title sequences. Aim to select ones that relate in some way to the type of production which you are interested in making yourself. This may be because of the genre or because of sound, editing, camerawork or another aspect. When you write about it, it is good practice to relate your research (the AoT analysis) to the outcome (what you hope to make, how it inspired you).

You will make this in PowerPoint which we will later present as a Slideshare (PP uploads to Slideshare).

ART OF THE TITLE
Several slides:

• First slide has the screenshot from  Art of The Title

• Introduction : the overview with your first impressions, such as how genre / period is signalled

• Narrative: characters and plot - how is the audience drawn in?

• Mise-en-scene

• Credits

• Editing / pace / transitions

• Sound 

PREP: One by next Monday, please. You can use the class blog and those of previous students for guidance.
What to pick? 

1. Try Gone Girl or Boardwalk Empire or Nerve
2. Mindhunter is a good choice.

Title sequences analysed by the class for this task:

1. I Am The Night "Creative agency Elastic plays with the themes of darkness and light in this main-title sequence for TNT’s limited series, I Am the Night, directed by Wonder Woman‘s Patty Jenkins and starring Chris Pine...Retro LA noir". Almost monochrome, the title sequence builds through several visual codes hinting at stalking and murder, such as a shadowy figure slowly descending a flight of dark steps towards a schoolgirl whose body is first objectified through its headless framing then depicted as prostrate.
2. Stranger Things: "The show’s main titles function as a tribute to some of the era’s most iconic book covers and title sequences, a pastiche of first impressions. Paired with a synthy title track straight out of a Carpenter flick, the Stranger Things sequence echoes the openings of genre classics like Altered States and The Dead Zone both in form and tone. Large, hollow type drifts through a void, slowly assembling, its glowing red edges cutting through the darkness as smaller credits fade in and out. The primary typeface is Benguiat, carefully chosen for its deep associations with early ’80s Stephen King paperbacks, the Choose Your Own Adventure series, and other dusty, musty touchstones.The Stranger Things opening is not only a fitting successor to a revered title design tradition, but a testament to the power of type in motion and the enormous potency of nostalgia...The disjointed type getting set along with the music imbues it with this real sense of unease."
3. The Terror "A figure floating in an abyss. Faces that dissolve. The eerie black-and-white title sequence of AMC’s The Terror, about a Victorian-era Arctic expedition stalked by supernatural forces, will make you excited about being scared. Elastic’s Patrick Clair and Raoul Marks use black and white to stark effect in these chilling main titles. As sun dogs turn to auroras, the ships — HMS Erebus and HMS Terror — are frozen in place, the crew bound in snow and darkness for the endless winter, driven to madness and worse. One by one the crew fades from view, those who remain setting off into a white wasteland and an unknown fate. You FEEL the cold seeping out of your screen, not just via the condensation breath of each sailor, but the general texture and saturation of every scene."
4. Mindhunter : "The intro to Mindhunter is a sparse, minimalist minute-and-a-half of film, exclusively focusing on a pair of disembodied hands as they set up a tape recorder. This footage is then interspersed with exceedingly brief snippets of other pieces of footage. In execution, Fincher’s intro is dementedly and tangibly disquieting. From a craft standpoint, Fincher consistently makes choices to completely disarm the viewer. The perfectly-staged, sterile close-ups of the tape recording equipment are quickly and violently cut into by intrusive close-ups of mutilated corpses and murder victims. Here, Fincher is only further mutilating the corpses through his own edit, framing individual pieces of the body, cutting them off through the lines of the frame in an increasingly sporadic and off-kilter rhythmic sequence. To make matters even more affecting, each quick cut-in of the corpse shots are heightened through the use of quick push-ins. The end result of all of this is an almost subliminal effect; even though the shots of the corpses may be cutting in and out so quickly that your brain doesn’t necessarily register all of the information, your eye does. It creates a conflict within your own mind, if you will, which is why it’s so hard to pinpoint exactly what it is about the intro that’s so hair-raising until you go through it frame-by-frame and realize exactly what it is you’ve been watching. The footage of someone carefully and methodically setting up the tape recorder is spliced with gruesome footage that is a result of the exact same kind of careful planning and methodic action." Source: Will Jones 2019
5. American Horror Story: Asylum Part of a popular horror series, each opening sequence features visual imagery that references scenes in other sequels. In this example, dozens of gruesome actions inspire terror, and all are common horror tropes such as blood and gore, dead bodies and acts of violence. The Rennie Mackintosh font is used across the whole series.
   
6. Split "It’s driven by three simple ingredients: a black screen, white typography, and the typeface Helvetica. Title sequences that focus exclusively on typography are rare, particularly in the current context of CGI-heavy work. Designed by Creative Director Aaron Becker and a small team at LA-based studio Filmograph, the opening sees each on-screen credit sliced up, segmented into a 24-frame grid and layered. The personalities of the main character are revealed, each square in the 24-frame grid repeating the crawl and echoing his many identities. The sequences are stark, chilling, and innovative."