Creating the titles

The making of our titles was put together through Live Type and After Effects. We begun to work on Live Type by picking the colour of the titles and then sifting through various effects to add to them. We then started positioning them in different places on the page. We used our real first names but then made up the last names amongst other names to add to the titles.

This screengrab shows the text used for one of the titles; 'Furor',  and the effect we have chosen to use throughout our title sequence which is 'Lurch'. We used this for all of them as it created a sense of continuity and looked more professional. It was interesting going through all the effects to find one that we thought matched the theme of our thriller opening. This particular title related to our audience because it came, hovered, and then disappeared which can be seen as eerie. As the titles are the first shot the audience will see, we wanted them to have an impact. it looks quite effective when they come and go in between shots of the woman in her room.

This screengrab shows one of our opening titles which is the Production company. It was placed in the center of the screen as it was the first title to appear so we wanted it to be big. The others are considerably smaller.

This timeline of our opening sequences shows each individual title and the duration it is on the screen for. We chose to have one title per frame to allow the titles to hover by themselves before it led into the shot.

These two screengrabs show two of our titles 'Costume' and 'Casting'. I have included two here to show the variation in positioning of our titles. These sreengrabs were taken from Live Type before we exported the final title sequence.

We chose to have our titles appear in front of a black background. Not only did this create simplicity, but it emphasized the white text which was ironically used.This echo's the white dress the woman was seen wearing which contradicts her personality, as it becomes apparent that she is not innocent and pure like the connotations of white suggest.





Most of the inspiration for our title sequence came after watching various title sequences of films such as Psycho and Se7en which is the one we favoured.
I took some screengrabs showing particular parts of the opening sequence that we took into account, liked, and then altered.

 This screengrab shows the effect of the text and the font used. We used a similar one as the hovering on the screen suited our theme; it was unstable just like the woman's mindset. However, the titles for Se7en were not all over black backgrounds, unlike ours which we thought showed consistency.

The reason for this screengrab is that it shows where we got the idea of the black background from, which  Kyle Cooper  initially created  for David Fincher's Se7ev (1995). This then influenced a whole host of designers and still  remains common for titles that use text over a black background. This also shows their use of two titles on one shot which we decided not to do so that the focus was on individual titles.


Here is the opening title sequence for Se7en:

Soundtrack ideas

For our soundtrack we wanted something more seductive then full of suspense, to mirror the character of the Femme Fatale. After researching into different soundtracks on the internet, we then defined our search to look for soundtracks from Film Noir films which is our chosen sub genre. We then discovered a particular jazz sound that we are going to reinvent and are planning to put together fro scratch. To do this, we will be sitting in on the schools band practice and listening to the high school students as they rehearse. This will allow us to choose who we want to include, and then we will make a soundtrack of our own to use in our thriller opening.

Here is a youtube video of a piece of music that gave us inspiration to go on and make our own version.

Breaking down film titles

Here is my timeline on film titles for 21 Jump Street. I got the initial title sequence from www.artofthetitle.com and then re watched the clip so I could stop and write down the times on the timeline.  The point of doing this task reinforced the idea that the titles appear in a certain sequence. By doing this task I learnt how long roughly each title should appear for and that this is usually the same in every film. I also noticed that the opening titles are not just titles, but also that they can have montages of images and shots whilst the titles are appearing, which I didn't take much notice of before.