Art of the Title

To be able to gain inspiration for my coursework, I have been looking at various title sequences featured on the website artofthetitle.com. The website has videos of, and discusses, countless amounts of film and television series openings from different genres, creators, and studios. Below are the title sequences that I think would be similar to the type of opening I would create for my film opening. 


Gentlemen Broncos

In this 2009 Jared Hess film, the opening title sequence shows a series of books with the names and jobs of various cast and crew members. The majority of the books used are sci-fi related, with covers of space/ supernatural images. This links well with our idea as we are planning to make a film based on UFOs. This is not too different to the idea we are planning to go with, as we want there to be physical, filmed titles, rather than ones that have been laid on top. However, this idea is not completely what we wanted to use as all the titles are on the same item, whereas we wanted to have them all on separate items. 

Napoleon Dynamite

Napoleon Dynamite (2004) is another film by Jared Hess, and is quite similar to the titles of Gentlemen Broncos. Like Hess' other film, this title sequence is constructed of physical titles, that are filmed and edited. The titles shown here are more like what we would use for ours, as the cast and crew are placed on various objects found in a school, where ours would be placed on household objects. However, this title sequence does not seem to continue into the story, and we have planned for ours to be integrated into the plot, with the story continuing after the titles have finished.

Community

From this title sequence, I really like how the titles are hand written. Similar to the others, all the titles are placed on a tangible object, rather than types like the majority of films. Although not what we planned to do, I am also a fan of the titles being on just one object, but on differnt parts- this makes it very diiferent to the others.

Almost Famous

Although not entirely how we planned to make our title sequence, I really like the idea of some titles being hand written. The title sequence for Almost Famous is almost completely written, except for some a few towards the end. I would like to use this idea and have at least one hand written title within the sequences, but may have it already written out, rather than seeing it be written out.

Dead Man on Campus

This final title sequence is from 1998 film Dead Man on Campus, which first features a production company animation. MTV Productions is first shown by an astronaut flying across the screen, clearly in space- fitting very well with our theme of space. Another reason why this title sequence fits with what we are envisioning is because they are designed to look like physical titles. Although they're typed, making them very different to the titles in the style of Napoleon Dynamite, they have been created to look like an exam paper which the camera moves around. I particularly like the style of the 3rd title showcased in the sequence, where the title is integrated to the other text, but put in bold to enable it to stand out.

I think the title sequence most similar to what we have in mind is Napoleon Dynamite. We would be able to replicate the variety of different objects involved, and could use a variety of different shot types to capture them. However, there are aspects of other title sequences that we could incorporate such as the hand written names of Almost Famous, and the science fiction objects of Gentlemen Broncos.