When watching the title sequences, I decided to only stick with movies I haven’t seen, and I generally wanted them to all follow in the speculative fiction genre. I did this for comparison purposes, and while there were many movies listed I remembered as having fantastic title sequences like “Thank You for Smoking,” “Coraline,” “Juno,” “Down With Love” and “Wall-E,” to name a few, I wanted to see what I could get out of the title sequences from movies I was not very familiar with.
The link to Art of the Title opened with “The Cabin in the Woods,” a horror picture that nearly all my friends saw as soon as it came out, being huge Joss Whedon fans. All I knew of the film was what I just wrote. At the risk of spoiling myself, I read the interview with the title creators after watching the sequence, because I love process and behind-the-scenes featurettes. “The Cabin in the Woods” clip is different because it is very long and ties together three different things: 1) the “real” sequence, an arty display of pools of blood displaying drawings of battle scenes ending in death, cutting to 2) two middle-aged men (sorry Bradley Whitford!) in a sterile office/laboratory warehouse environment and then changing to 3) a movie version of a college-aged girl in a shirt and underwear in her bedroom packing. All three of these sequences could very easily have been different movies, but that’s the point. In the interview, the designers discussed jumping into the movie without having the first sequence, but there was too much concern that audiences would get confused and think they were in the wrong movie, and went into exactly how they got the layering effect of the drawings over the blood, their process and the meanings they were going for. I loved this sequence because it was cool and different and definitely set a tone, one that was forgotten as I got engrossed into the next clip. But that’s probably the point — they want you to forget you’re watching a horror movie so you’ll actually be scared.
What was interesting to me in the interview was the points the director, Drew Goddard, and the main title designers, Jarik Van Sluijs and Pamela Green, said about how sometimes title sequences are used to fix problems in the script (notice they said script and not movie): a form of problem-solving and storytelling. Essentially, these guys have to go back and fill in holes so reshooting isn’t necessary.
Some title sequences are expository, like in “The Kingdom” (“Argo,” which I saw recently, is a similar type of film and does the same thing), where the type lays out a timeline and gives a brief but necessary history of the region (in this case Saudi Arabia) before the movie begins. Expository sequences would be the ones that are most thought out at a script stage, yet the ones that would need to be there to fix storytelling holes. “Serenity,” another Joss Whedon-related film, delves right into the story from the first frame, introducing each of the characters through interactions with the hero, Captain Mal of the ship Serenity (played by Nathan Fillion). This ship might be crashing, so he has to talk to everyone on the crew, and everyone onboard gets a few lines which sets up their relationship to Mal and the reason why they are onboard.
“Captain America: The First Avenger” has one of my favorite sequences from the nearly dozen that I watched. This title sequence was actually used at the end of the film. Although both beginning and end title sequences have similar goals, beginning ones have to keep the viewer interested and set up the tone for the movie; end sequences don’t have to do that, although ideally they would reinforce the tone and themes of the movie and keep audiences from leaving. This one was also technologically sophisticated, taking 2D images of famous American propaganda posters and making them 3D and slightly animated them. Pans, swipes and zooms are used to transition between posters, and for many of them the background is flat while the main image (e.g., an airplane) is in 3D. The propeller, in this case, is animated slightly.
It’s a unified style, a painted aesthetic underscored by the very patriotic music. Although I am aware this is a superhero movie, this title sequence could easily be telling a different type of story, less fantastical, a lighthearted period piece much like “Down With Love” or “Catch Me If You Can,” two other movies featured on Art of the Title and Watch the Titles.
Since I watched a number of sequences in similar genres, I began to notice themes. Both “Snow White and the Huntsman” and “The Girl With the Dragon Tattoo” used similar gothic fonts, which in the case of the former movie, was a font (Bodoni) modified to fit the film specifically, and both had very arresting music with lyrics, Florence Welch of Florence and the Machine howling over pieces of a man in armor, a sword, and a black dress that shatters – or at least that’s what I could make out – in “Snow White.” Like “Cabin in the Woods,” it’s about battle, and a gothic one at that.
Trent Reznor of Nine Inch Nails and now an Academy Award-winning film composer did the music for “Dragon Tattoo” and “Se7en,” which both featured dark cutoffs of images and jagged, industrial music. “Dragon Tattoo” also had very small text to introduce the actors, a technique commonly seen in title sequences, as if to not be so intrusive. It’s also worth noting that David Fincher directed both movies.
I mistakenly thought “Laws of Attraction” was a similar movie, one by Bret Easton Ellis (apparently that one is “The Rules of Attraction,”) and so I was disappointed to see not another dark, gothic sequence, this time featuring Manhattan, but a “classic” Manhattan opening. I knew it wasn’t the right movie, confirmed when Pierce Brosnan and Julianne Moore’s names came up. Ugh. A romantic comedy (and still one I have no interest in seeing). I got this from its lighthearted tone, its breezy technique of moving rectangles across the screen of cabs driving in Manhattan, and the smaller rectangles moving throughout the frame. It’s those elements that are supposed to make the sequence visually appealing, since the actual shots are dull. A middle-aged movie.
The other title sequence I really didn’t like was for “X-Men: First Class.” Although director Matthew Vaughn specifically did not want heavy 3D graphics like in previous X-Men movies, I couldn’t connect what this sequence – white circles filled with Xs and light shapes in circles and dots – had to do with the movie, which I know is a film about a group of superheroes and one that tends on the dark side (as opposed to something like “Captain America”). This could be the sequence for a movie in the ‘70s, perhaps. It’s also worth noting that this is an end sequence, so it might flow more with the movie had I actually seen it, especially since sometimes it directly flows from the last scene in the film.
The ones that were most arresting to me tended to incorporate everything, from typography to music, into an aesthetic whole. That’s why “Captain America” worked so powerfully; I could envision what the movie looked like and what it was about, even though I knew nothing other than its title. But typography isn’t everything; “The Kingdom” had strong typography, and I liked that part along with the timeline the most, but got bored since it mostly focused on television and movie clips of speeches. Many title designers, in addition to getting creative with how they frame the sequences and the elements they use, also design their own font specifically for the movie, sometimes even modifying an existing font to get the look they want. Some went for innovative approaches, like in “Serenity,” using it as a way to open the story. None of the end credits I watched were used to wrap up the story, although this is sometimes used as an epilogue or as outtakes or shorts – most often seen in cartoons than in live action, which is probably why those techniques were not evident in the sample I watched.
Title sequences do a lot – establish tone, set story, character, sometimes even plot. The best ones take the spirit of the film and turn it into something wordless, merely a feeling or a sense. I was lucky I didn’t have access to Netflix while watching these clips because I have a lot of movies to watch!