OPENING TITLES

Tips from the Pros at Artifactuality

By David Weiss

In the heat of the moviemaking battle, it’s easy to overlook one of the motion pictures most crucial cornerstones: the title sequence. Directors and producers dealing the with temperamental actors, script rewrites and catering snafus that consume the day-to-day shoot often have nothing left in the tank for producing the all-important opening credits that introduces their masterpiece to the audience.

Fortunately, that’s why designers have been put on Earth. With the right design group on board, movie producers can recruit the fresh eyes and visual sophistication necessary to create an alluring start for their motion picture. At the studios of NYC-based graphics and broadcast agency Artifactuality (www.artifactuality.com), for example, the natural evolution of title sequences is a primary focus as the creative combo of Christine Moh and Robert Mickens constantly expand on their passion for great title sequences. Their latest work is for the gripping upcoming 2007 indie release Within, a co-production of Bigfoot Entertainment Ltd. and Filmmakers Alliance Productions (www.filmmakersalliance.com), an LA-based community of filmmakers.

“The title sequence is extremely important: It sets the tone and reels your audience in,” says Moh. “It’s an essential tool for getting the viewer oriented, and the magic of title sequences is that they can be as creative as the film itself – you can manipulate time and space as much as you want. That’s why Artifactuality was initially drawn to titles: the abundance of creative possibilities.”

SETTING A PRECEDENT

Saul Bass’ pioneering work for Alfred Hitchcock films such as North by Northwest (1959) and Psycho (1960) are generally regarded as all-time title sequence standard-bearers. The Artifactuality team point to the films It’s a Mad Mad Mad Mad World (1963), Catch Me if You Can (2002), and Napoleon Dynamite (2004) as other compelling examples of title sequence design. “Mad World encapsulates the entire story in the open by graphically showing everything from Point A to Point Z,” Mickens notes. “Napoleon Dynamite gets you into the mood by doing very clever graphical things with this clearly unglamorous food that you’d get in a high school cafeteria – you immediately know that this movie is a story about high school.”

Recruited by Within’s producer, Liam Finn, for their hybrid digital/analog approach to visualization, Artifactuality’s process employed equal parts research and intuition to create the title sequence for the film, a supernatural psychological thriller about a gifted but troubled girl who sees evil spirits that cause harm upon the living. “You have to approach it like any other visual communication project – you have to get input,” says Moh. “We read the script and talked to Liam, who let us know that that these Russian nesting dolls in the movie’s first scene were very important.

“That gave us a jumping-off point for creating an opening with beautiful, rich almost hypnotic imagery of Russian nesting dolls, accompanied by a hauntingly spare cello soundtrack. Our goal was to establish a mood and atmosphere of mystery that emphasizes the title, Within, always going deeper and deeper.”

Moh and Mickens point to their experience doing title sequences for popular TV shows such as MTV’s “The Real World: Key West” and “Well Done: The Fresh Meat Reunion”, and Oxygen Network’s ApPARENTly Speaking” and “Oh! Baby You’re on TV”, as invaluable for moving to the film world. “In TV and elsewhere, the definition of graphic design is that you’re editing something down to its absolute minimum,” explains Mickens, a winner of an Emmy Award for Best Title Sequence. “For a TV show or motion picture, a good designer is going to detect the mood and then make a visual connection that translates that.”

BREAKING IT DOWN

Artifactuality point to three essential components that the title sequence is built on:

Typography: The choice of font that will tell the world the movie’s director, executive producer, lead actors, title and more is a critical balance of art, instinct and science. “Typography is the king in graphic design – it’s a visual stimulant that viewers are not aware of, but it affects them,” says Moh. “It has a great deal to do with carrying a mood or communicating an idea visually.”

For the Within titles, Artifactuality chose a modernized ancient font, Trajan, which is a modernized interpretation of the chiseled writings of the Romans circa 1^st Century AD. “This is a psychological mystery, so we thought it called for an elegant open – something Gothic, and Trajan was perfect,” Mickens says. “When you have the right font, you just say, ‘This works’ – you can’t give a logical reason. For the viewer, it helps them to relate to the mood that you’re trying to create.”

Visuals: The sights that accompany the titles can be spare or psychedelic, minimalist or mind-blowing. Ultimately, however, designers should make sure that they support the typography, not swallow it up. Bass’ work for Psycho is famous for the nervous energy it generated, carving up the screen with horizontal and vertical bars in a highly unsettling way, yet the names and credits always emerge bold and clear from the geometrical storm.

In preparing Within, Mickens used a digital still camera with close-up lens to shoot over 200 still-frame pictures of Russian nesting dolls, capturing them from different angles, perspectives and distances. Afterwards, Moh used editing software to merge them into a mysterious motion sequence, where the various images meld in and out of each other in beautifully disorienting fashion.

“The mood and pacing is dark, and I loved editing the images because I could tell that Bob had kept the typography locations firmly in mind as he shot them,” relates Moh. “There is also a use of ‘negative space’ that gives this airy feel to the images, but also effectively builds tension into the graphic design.”

Music: A soundtrack that successfully juxtaposes the text and visuals is the icing on the title cake. Moh and Mickens chose Yo Yo Ma’s spare cello composition, “Echoes of a Lost City”, for the Within open’s temp track (which will either be licensed or replaced by the time of release). “We thought it called for music that was totally acoustic, something that was all about creating space and emptiness,” Mickens says. “A lost city is a scary thing – desolate and lonely. A track like this makes these chubby-cheeked, smiling Russian nesting dolls as creepy as Chucky.”

For filmmakers in search of the right creatives to handle their all-important title sequence, it’s all about fresh eyes that can relate compelling visuals to the story – preferably brought in before the very last minute. “Graphic eyes see things differently: They’re about boiling things down and making them work in seconds, unlike filmmakers who work in hours,” Moh concludes. “When you can manipulate typography, visuals and music to effectively bring a motion picture’s nuances to the forefront, that’s the fun part. That’s why people do this.” – David Weiss