In viewing Kyle Cooper’s design for Se7en I realized a few things about how type can effect an audiences mood and provide a foreshadowing to coming events. Cooper’s work in particular showed the skewed reality of a serial killer and used a nine inch nails soundtrack to facilitate an environment of dread and foreboding. I kept the visual elements in mind as I analyzed a few other title sequences.
The first was of “The Kingdom”. While the film is largely about the actions of a FBI team investigating a terrorist bombing in Riyadh the title sequence serves to acclimate the audience to the film’s overall theme. We start off with a motion tween in the desert until the type (conspicuously designed as oil stained) shapes itself into a time line. The dates shift along with images of American Oil men and Saudi Sheiks making deals. As the subtle techno music increases we see more and more images of violence and war as a result of this history. Suez Crisis, Boom! Yom Kippur War, Boom! Gulf War One, Boom! until we see twin towers symbolizing Saudi Arabia as the premier Oil Producer and the U.S. as the largest consumer. As planes fly towards it the screen blacks out and shows us a smoke plume over New York shaped like an oil slick. To me this whole sequence is representative of our relationship in the Arabian peninsula, alliances are fractious at best and the forces of tradition and modernity are on a violent collision course with one another.
The second sequence I saw was of my favorite Science Fiction movie “Alien”. Richard Greenberg did a masterful job in conveying the sense that space was not only a place of hope and exploration, it could also be a place of sheer terror. In the sequence we see the title appear in gradual, non-segmented letters. Always appearing in the center, subtlety suggesting that the chest-burster monster would come from you, the self. All the while the tempo of a stringed instrument picks up into a gradual shriek. This makes an excellent tension builder.
The last sequence I viewed was of the greatly acclaimed series “Deadwood”. The titles are roughewn and patchy, shown as consistently developing with every frame. we see images of a horse galloping in the wilderness interspersed with images of the frontier, a prospector panning for gold, a butcher cutting up his stock, a whore attracting a customer, shots being poured, gold nuggets being weighed on a scale. Then the title and the horse reappear in front of a reflection in a pool of water and subsequently disappear when a saloon comes into view. This is all accompanied with a frenetic musical addition of a fiddle and an Armenian doudouk. The theme that seems to be conveyed is the horse representing the spiritual freedom that we have at inception whereas the other images are of the impulsive desires that come across our path.
I thoroughly enjoyed this posting as it seemed to give us the opportunity to deconstruct visual imagery and discover their meaning.