Opening Title Research

Saul Bass is famous for creating the most successful and interesting title sequences to date. Seeing as the genre for my group's film is horror/psychological thriller it makes sense to focus on these types of opening sequences. I am now analysing closely the opening titles of numerous horror films because by doing this i gain more ideas about what i want our original film to entail. Additionally, the more interesting the opening titles are the better our film will look. Moreover, the titles have to link with the key themes and meanings behind the film and the best way to make sure our film has these key elements, is to analyse other successful openings.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Tek8QmKRODw

Hitchcock's Psycho uses the famous Saul Bass essence (as he created the opening titles) by using the signature lines. The opening titles on a whole work so well because the eerie music is parallel to the lines and text onscreen. When "Psycho" pops up and is then made distorted; this links to the idea that the mind of the psycho in the film is sketchy and messed up.

Due to numerous reasons, we have had to think of alternative ideas in case we cannot shoot what we had originally planned. So, we thought of the idea that because we have a Toymaker as a main character in our film, we could use some of the time in the opening sequence to show a man building a doll, or creating some sort of mechanism before actually getting into the scenes of the little girl actually being snatched. A very influential clip of opening titles that follows the basis of our idea is from the film Se7en.



The distorted images and blackouts to show the titles are the sorts of aspects we would like to include in our film, so this was a very useful opening to analyse.


http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jtyuc2Rz2mQ

The above opening sequence is chilling, unexpected, confusing and just plain eerie. Perfect for what we're looking for our opening sequence to be! The use of music and children's photographs is just what we want to portray to the audience that there is a child involved in the film, and there is also a villainous character "watching" and "plotting" around the idea of children. I think it's a very relevant clip to have as part of our film's research.