99% Invisible - 99% Invisible-28- Movie Title Sequences

Episode Date: June 10, 2011

More and more I’m finding that the first 2-3 minutes of a movie are my favorite part of the film. My life is devoted to the beautiful expression of information, which is why film title sequences hold a special place … Continue reading →

We get support from UC Davis, a globally ranked university, working to solve the world's most pressing problems in food, energy, health, education, and the environment. UC Davis researchers collaborate and innovate in California and around the globe to find transformational solutions. It's all part of the university's mission to promote quality of life for all living things. Find out more at 21stCentury.ucdavis.edu Find out more at 21stCentry.ucdavis.edu. This is 99% Indusible. I'm Roman Mars. If I was a flower growing wild and free, all I'd want is you to be my sweet honey bee. And if I was a tree growing tall and green, all I'd want is you to shade me and be my

leaves. So the teenage girl named Juno is walking down the street with a half-empty one-gallon jug of sunny, de-citrus beverage in one hand. She passes a tree and everything becomes animated. It's kind of a low-fi, unpolished Xerox copy animation inspired by punk rock music flyers. How long did you have that main title music from Juno stuck in your head? It's still there, isn't it? Yeah, I think so. punk rock music flyers. And if I was a tree growing tall and green, All I'd want is you to shade me and be my lead. The title sequence immediately establishes

Juno's quirky world view. You can't even try to sequence the music, so you must live with these songs for months at a time, right? Yes. As a title designer, it's very important that the music that you use in a sequence is something that you love, that you really enjoy working with because it can be rough otherwise.

My name is Garrett Smith and I am a film title designer. Garrett and his partner, Jenny Lee, did the titles for Juno and Up in the Air, among others. My name is Ian Albenson and I am the founder and editor-in-chief of Art of the Title, a website that curates title design. Ian's title is awesome. It's a completely different set of people that do the work.

That do title sequences. People don't always realize that. And I don't always seem to be always surprised that, oh, someone actually thought about this and someone actually gets paid to design and to work on something so separate from the film, yet so connected to the film. Fundamentally, a title sequence is a presentation

of a legal document to the audience. It's a list of names of the crew and actors and everything who are associated with a film. And then there's the more interesting and artistic reason for the title sequence. Which is establishing tone and perhaps a storyline. But there are rules. What are you doing a studio film? The designer or the company will get a document that's maybe 10 to 15 pages long. If you just wrote out the text for the title sequence, it could fit easily on a single page.

Of course, it's this 15 page document. And beside each title, there's several paragraphs of text about how each title needs to be treated. Like maybe in some sequences, the lead to actors require their names to be bigger than the other titles. And they'll actually list in the document the exact percentage size that it needs to be bigger than the other titles in the sequence. So it's very specific and as a designer it gets very frustrating and challenging to deal with this because it feels very limiting to need to have every single title in the sequence be exactly the same size. When it comes to innovation and influence in title design, there are two words you need to know.

Saul Bath. He was a major benchmark in terms of realizing that you could have good design in a title sequence. When Saul Bath came along, he was a designer that started to work on more promotion for films and then started to bring his illustration and design style to films. He worked with Hitchcock on a number of pieces. If the title sequences of Saul Bastard immediately springed mine to yourself a favor and Google an enemy of murder,

a man with a golden arm or psycho or a vertigo, so good. What I love about some of his earlier title sequences is if you look at them, they're basically animated film posters. But a lot of that Saul Bastyle faded away in the 80s. You know, the 80s and the 90s, you started to get the branding idea with films. And so a lot of title sequences weren't so much title sequences, but were just sort of the logo of the film.

And so you're creating the brand for the film. So you have back to the future where it's a very iconic logo design. And you have a lot of that in late 80s and early 90s. You didn't see as many complete opening sequences or title sequences be them standalone or sort of integrated with the film. Which is not done very much these days. I don't know if you've noticed that, but there are not a lot of films where there's just a big logo that you see on the poster, you know? But then we hit the second major benchmark, the movie 7. It's titles were created by Kyle Cooper. He sort of reintroduced the idea that the title sequence could be its own thing,

which is what bastard decades earlier. The title sequence of Seven works as both a standalone vignette and as a vital introduction to the grimey and obsessive feel of the movie. The serial killer in Seven doesn't appear until two thirds of the way into the film, but you really get to know the killer right here in the first two minutes. Kyle Cooper took us inside his head. The most memorable title sequences are really ones where, you know, there's a great movie after it. If Seven was put in front of some, you know, terrible movie that no one saw, it wouldn't have moved on to influence a generation of title designers after it.

One of Ian Elvinson's favorite title sequences is another Kyle Cooper creation, the island of Dr. Moro. It was the one that kicked Ian in the head and made him start noticing titles in the first place. But if you were smart, you probably didn't see the island of Dr. Marrow, and you don't know how cool the title sequence is. But every human on Earth over the age of 20 knows the name of Garrett Smith's favorite title sequence. The TV title sequence for Cheers.

I can watch that endlessly. I remember liking it before I was a designer. I had anything to do with design. So I was trying to put my finger on why I like it. And of course, a great theme song on that title sequence makes a big difference. But it also just has lovely typography, very simple, lovely typography, and the editing of the sequence is fantastic. It just captures the entire tone of the television show in 30 seconds to a minute. Cheers is a montage of historical drawings and photographs of people enjoying themselves

in bars. And what they do underneath each of the title cards for the actors is they actually find a historical image that does sort of suggest that character in the television series. The reason I enjoy it is warmth and friendship, and that really comes across, I think, in that title sequence. There are a lot of fans of film title design out there. I was trying to figure out why that is, and I feel like film title design more than other sorts of design has a bit of a longevity, because it is committed to film. I guess a lot of design is commercial or prince, and it kind of is designed to exist for a week or two weeks, and then just to vanish from the face of the planet.

Whereas film design, you really do have to think about, what is this going to look like in 25 years? You hope that the movie you're working on is going to be one of those movies that's going to be seen many years from now, you know? And it has to kind of hold up over time. 99% Invisible was produced this week by me, Roman Mars, with support from Lunar, making a difference with creativity.

It's a project of KALW-91.7, local public radio in San Francisco, the American Institute of Architects in San Francisco, and the Center for Architecture and Design. For videos and links to all the titles we talked about in this episode as well as a kick-ass montage of kick-ass titles edited together by Ian Albinson. Go to the website, it's 99%invisible.org. Who I want to do a little social media outreach before you go. If you could go like this show on Facebook, that would mean great deal to me, because there's this other project that's

actually really noble called the 99% and I just want to get more fans than that. So there's like a thousands and thousands and thousands of you like on average like 10, 12,000 of you listen to this weekly and I have almost 700 fans on Facebook so I think we can do better. Okay that's one. The other one is, if you would take the time to review this show and iTunes, you would not believe the impact it has. You're like a Nielsen family, but you get to choose yourself

when you review something on iTunes. It represents millions of people. It's crazy. The rankings, I go up instantly when I get one review in iTunes. So, if you could do that too, I hear five stars is a very popular option. That would mean so much. Alright, thank you, 9th percentile. We'll talk next week. you