Title Sequence Introduction

Today we looked further into title sequences. A title sequence is the method a film credits production and cast members using visuals and sound. Many title sequences aim to establish character, setting, genre, mood or atmosphere.

Common Credits are:

Production Companies
Producer
Title
Director
Other key crew 
Executive producer
Top billing actors

There are also different conventions for title sequences which are usually split into three parts:

Technical convention: Actual techniques used, e.g: cinematography, mise-en-scene, editing, sound.

Symbolic convention: Objects shown with deeper connotations/meanings.
Genre convention: Things that hint what genre the film is.

We looked at several title sequences.  These were:

The Avengers (1998)
Hulk (2003)
Se7en (1995)
Napoleon Dynamite (2004)
Juno (2007)

We discussed how the elements of mise-en-scene, sound, editing and cinematography all come together to set the mood for the film. We found they sometimes tell the story and give hints about what is going to happen. However, the audience may not always see the hints as they tend to be really slight so that it is hard to see.

We then looked at the credit timeline for Juno (2007). This showed us what credits appeared on the screen and what time.

We then went to the Mac room and analysed a title sequence of our own choice and did a credit timeline, I chose to do one for True Blood which is one of the TV Programmes that I watch.

Sound

Today we looked at different sounds that would correlate to our title sequences. We looked at copyright free music websites such as AudioNetwork. We searched "Horror" which turned out to be very successful and we got a lot of really good music that would go extremely well with the idea we have for our title sequence. For example, one music piece named 'Nightmares Before Bedtime' included piano which sounded like children's nursery rhymes yet with a creepy atmosphere which we thought would be absolutely great for our title sequence. We thought this would go perfectly with our storyboarding ideas of our young protagonist walking into the woods. We found another piece (Nightshade) that included a low, rhythmic beat which would blend well with the first piece, so we are definitely going to mix several music tracks together to rise the tension in our title sequence.

My teacher also suggested making our own music, using Logic Pro, so we played around with various sounds on that programme. This included an organ, violin and piano. However, I am not sure if we will actually use this idea in our title sequence.

Organising Filming

We created a schedule for the next week at school and over half term.  This was to plan what we did in lesson and when we filmed over half term, that way we new what we had to do on the days that we had the opportunity to do filming and other things to do with our final project.

Story Boarding Continued

After missing a double lesson we started our final story board and we started writing what type of shot we were going to use and where we would put the titles. 

After our group feedback and looking at title sequences similar to our film genre (horror/thriller), we considered what we had been told/seen and continued with our storyboards.  We focused on hinting our plot twist by showing more obvious pictures very quickly (for example, an extreme close up of a sliced neck with blood), and added these into our storyboards and then we numbered them in the order that we wanted to see in our final product.

Story Boarding

We started our story boarding and after discussing what we saw our title sequence looking like i started to draw out what we had discussed. We first did a rough draft of a story board to star us off and to leave open ideas that we may have in the future. We did our draft on one side of an A4 piece of paper. 

Questionnaires

This week we looked at receiving feedback from people that our chosen genre would appeal to as our target audience. Our homework was to do this by handing out questionnaires to our target audience and letting them fill out the questionnaire to know what they would expect from a horror / Thriller genre title sequence. We created a questionnaire with 10 questions and handed it out to people that fit in our primary and secondary target audience; males and females aged 15-25.

Typography

In todays lesson we focused on typography. We discussed what we thought typography was and after being told what it was we looked at different genres of films and how typography is used with the title sequences, we also discussed what colour and font the typography was and where it was placed on the screen.

Firstly, we looked at Catch Me If You Can (2002). This placed two different fonts next to each other.  The serif font reminded us of a typewriter, which we thought could relate to Tom Hank's character of a policeman. This was because he would have had to type up reports on a typewriter, also relating to the time period the film is set in.  
The second font was a sans serif font, which was used to create parts of the images on screen.  It is much more fluent than the serif font; changing and flowing into different objects.  This could represent Leonardo DiCaprio's character as he moves around the world with different identities and professions.  They are placed at the sides of the screen a lot, to allow the audience to focus on the images telling the story.

After looking at Catch Me If You Can, we then looked at Lord of War (2005). The font used for this title sequence gave us an idea that it was very military as it was in blocks, capitals and sans serif. This title sequence can relate to Catch Me If You Can because this sequence uses a considerably small font which will draw the attention to the video going on the the background which tells the story. An exception tot this would be the title which was massively larger text and was central. However, unlike Catch Me If You Can the text did not correlate to the action and had very little if not, no movement at all.



The last title sequence we looked at was Forrest Gump (1994). The genre of this film is drama/romance, therefore has a centered serif font, which fades in and out in a sort of dreamy manner which correlates tot eh genre of the film. The text is very plain, possibly connoting the main character. We also established that serif fonts are considered formal, posh, classic and timeless. 

In my title sequence, I will use a sans serif font as my genre is a thriller/horror film, not matching any of the films that we looked at, I will use a scratchy font that will show this and it will also better suit my genre.