As the brief was being delivered, various examples came into my head of opening titles that had stuck with me for a variety of reasons:
- The sprawling landscapes and stills of oil paintings in classic films like Sound of Music and Casablanca.
- Hitchcockian angular shapes travelling along dark backgrounds.
- The mixture of abstract shapes and slow-motion footage of sexy women firing guns that James Bond intros have.
- The use of realistic graphics like the exploding type in Zombieland and the Game of Thrones machinery map.
The first thing I wanted to do was to read through each potential film and just write down my initial thoughts. Gut reaction is often fairly useful. Once I'd done that, I watched the trailers on the Sequence Inspiration lists and jotted down things that stood out to me that I could potentially
Following this, I went on a deep dive into titles in general. I investigated some from my initial list as well others that caught my eye when I was looking through the Art of the Title website. Astoundingly, in an article on 10 female title designers I came across studios and animated sequences that I had spoken about in casual conversation (like Only Murders and The Morning Show) for years, so I'm grateful for this article for flagging them as great places for inspiration.
Sorry about all the Play buttons on this page - these are screenshots rather than videos, but I couldn't figure out a way to get rid of the triangles.
By the end of Week 1 I had a million ideas and nowhere to put them. I love the research stage and finding inspirations and ideas and visuals, but it's like they're just filling up a balloon that has no release valve, and despite it being early I really wanted to come to a decision about which title I was going to focus on.
Going into this week I was starting to doodle more and start turning ideas into reality. The Frontier poster was an image I pictured as being the start of a sequence that would lead to a slow zoom in amongst the fibres of the tumbleweed. As I was watching videos I would see small things that I wanted to be able to do, so would quickly throw on a YouTube tutorial and teach myself small effects so I wouldn't forget about these stand-out moments in other people's animations.
Rattling Stick studio's visuals for Casino Royale are a massive source of inspiration for this project.
