Blue Valentine is a film directed by Derek Cianfrance, released in 2010. I watched it the other night and thought the end credits were superb.


Take a look:

This title sequence was designed by Jim Helton, an experimental filmmaker and editor who commonly collaborates with Derek Cianfrance. Mr. Helton has a very interesting past: born in Germany on a US army base, he then went off to attend the University of Colorado to study film under Stan Brakhage and Phil Solomon, whose work he credits as his main influence.

 In an interview on theArtofTheTitle, he cites Phil Solomon as his main inspiration and recommends interested in this type of design to explore Phil's work. He talks about learning a process called "bi-packing," a process of placing two film strips on top of each other, and then rephotographing them to create a different effect than a superimposition. He goes on to describe his process for this sequence, made entirely on Final Cut Pro, taking a layer of footage of out-of-focus exploding fireworks, then taking the song by Grizzly Bear and using its rhythms to edit, and finally taking set photography by Davi Russo and reframing them to fit within the fireworks, and cutting them up into little details. Although he does not give away entirely his process, he says it was basically made with the composite feature and lots of tweaking. The fourth layer, the actual typeface for which he used  "a short fade in, and a long fade out, like exploding and disheartening light." And finally, the fifth layer he discusses is the sound recordings of fireworks streaking and crackling, children playing and laughing, mixing it with the image to create an abstract echo.

You can read the article here if interested:
http://www.artofthetitle.com/title/blue-valentine/

I really like the elegance of this piece, but I really love how this clearly shows me that the tools and tricks to do these things are not necessarily difficult at all. Instead, coming up with good design in the first place is the actual labor.

Phil Solomon's influence on Jim Helton makes it clear how important an awareness and attention to other design truly is for making original design work. By paying attention to other's work, Jim was able to find ideas as references points for this piece. For me, this is a good example of how paying careful attention to design, and being knowledgeable and active supplies you with a well of creative influence from which to pull.


You can see Phil Solomon's work here:
http://www.philsolomon.com/

Write-on Effect

In class on Wednesday Arturo mentioned how we would start seeing the write-on effect everyone now that we've learned it. While I was watching Motion Graphics videos this week I really did notice the effect.

One of the things I've seen it in is the end credits for the Sherlock Holmes movie that just came out. The animation in these credits is really similar to the exercise we did with creating a piece of paper and animating writing on it.

It's cool to see the things we're learning applied to a professional animation. Here's the full end credits. The effect is most noticeable when it says the title of the film 46 seconds into the video.


Sherlock Holmes : A Game Of Shadows end credits sequence from Danny Yount on Vimeo.

Great Website to Look at Openings and Kyle Cooper

"Forget the Film, Watch the Titles!" is a wonderful website to view a multitude of great title sequences and ending credits. The site is a great reference to each movies opening sequence providing the opening for viewing and also stills of the title sequence. Many of the films have very detailed storytelling of how something was conceptualized and interesting facts about the production process. This makes for an easy read and the ability to learn more knowledge about your film's title sequence. For example Rango's section provides some of the original sketches of characters and also information from an interview with the films prologue's creative director, Henry Hobson. An interesting bit of information I found was that Rango's end credit sequence and title sequence were created in just a few weeks. If I were to guess a length of time for a blockbusters opening and credits I would have thought it maybe would have taken months.

The website also had a link to an interview with Kyle Cooper which I embedded below. If you need inspiration for idea if you are creating your own title sequence I believe it is worth watching this interview. Kyle's idea to look at objects on a microscopic level and his drive to study things such as bones, skin, and various other objects allows him unlimited content to continually produce original looking title sequences. He proves that you can take any interest and use it to provide some kind of source material. His drive to find hand made objects to create more complex effects has challenged me to do the same. Over fall break I look forward to capturing different source material using smoke, that I may be able to use in future projects.

Kyle Cooper interview (1/2) - Watch the Titles from SubmarineChannel on Vimeo.