Signs opening titles: too easy for a major motion picture

Sorry for the short post guys but I just wrapped from 13 hours on set and I'm a little exhausted. I quickly just wanted to point out something I noticed when flipping through artofthetitle.com the other day. The "Signs" opening title sequence. Some of you may remember when this movie came out... I myself was just a little 10 year. Most people thought the movie was terrible but as a 10 year old I was scared out of my mind and therefore thought it was pretty good.

I got a better idea about what people where talking about when I watched the opening sequence on artofthetitle.com Yes, it's effective... but good god it's too simple. I realize now that I could have done this in just one of our class periods.

Take a look at it at this link.

I think you'll all agree that this title sequence is a bit too simple. The music however I still find very captivating. 

Final Post

Well, since it's the end of the semester, I thought I would follow the common theme and do one final post about what most of us have spent all semester working on, opening titles. It's pretty amazing the appreciation 4 months of AfterEffects can give you for the few minutes that come at the beginning of a television show or film. I think we all can agree that it's a lot more effort than we probably expected, and some films in particular have opening sequences that are not only done to perfection, but incredibly memorable.

The photo above shows some of the greatest opening sequences from today and years past, from Vertigo to Catch Me If You Can. A nice list of some of the best opening can be found here. I'm sure someone at one point or another has posted that website, but regardless it's always worth a second look!

This is my final "assignment" before I am officially done at Ithaca College, so I'd like to hope all of you the best of luck whether it's as a student next semester, working in the spring, and last but not least, being a professor at IC! I had a lot of fun.

Doctor Who

As I'm sure everyone knows, I'm a terribly big fan of Doctor Who. In our classes we've been talking a lot about opening sequences to TV Shows and movies. Doctor Who is a show that has been around since the 1960's, which is extremely impressive. This also means that it has a ton of different opening sequence, new ones for the new seasons and new ones for the new Doctors. This video below shows each and every opening sequence from 1963-2011



I find it fascinating how, over the years, Doctor Who has maintained a level of consistency in the opening titles. The same type of music is always present. The same setting of it being "in space" and sometimes going through a time vortex, and showing the Doctor's face on screen. So not only do you see the different title sequences, but you also see all of the different actors who had the amazing opportunity to play the Doctor. The show itself stopped around the 1980s and then they release one movie and when the show came back in 2005, the opening title still had that classic Doctor Who feel too it.

Phantom of the Opera- Titles Project

So I'm currently trying to come up with an outline for how I want to do the Phantom of the Opera opening titles. The movie (the 2004 version) doesn't have full titles, just the title of the movie and a zoom into a picture as they start the film. Here's the actual opening for the movie.

I really like the candle/flickering light theme that have going on, and I'd like to expand that at least for part of my opening titles. I'm using part of the music that's played over the final scrolling credits for the movie, which is about 2:20 in length. Now I'm just trying to figure out what I want to have appear at what time and what names to put in the credits (after I get through the main cast members, director, etc). I'm also a little worried that I face a big learning curve when it comes to making the names show up and making that light flicker. I'm currently trying to look for Video Copilot tutorials that fit what I'm looking for, but I can't find any great ones at the moment. I think I'll be using a lot of Write-On/Stroke effects and playing around with keyframes on the lights.

I'm hoping I can get through the outlining process soon so I can start putting elements together and seeing if this will actually work. We'll see how it goes...

Art of Film Title Design

What makes you able to recognize a movie or TV series right from the start? The title sequence/opening. Opening sequences have the ability to set the viewers expectations and set a tone as viewers immediately begin judging a work as soon as the title sequence is displayed. I have seen openings before that have completely turned me away from viewing the rest of the work. This website gives a pretty good overview of how title sequence design has changed through the decades.

The site brings up the ultimate importance of a well designed title sequence during the times of silent films. These original titles were developed through the use of white lettering over a black background. Along with the title came other slides with text to help viewers understand what is going on within the piece.

Title sequences sure have come a far way since than. The use of multiple programs and a team of professionals to create what makes it to the screen today. The website includes great examples of different opening title sequences. For my first project I will be recreating the Brady Bunch opening sequence. I plan on using previous video projects for the source material for this project.

Outstanding Achievement in Main Title and Graphic Design

After exploring the winner of the Emmy for Outstanding Animated Program last week I decided it would be interesting to look into other Emmy award categories related to graphics and animation. After searching through a list of the daytime Emmy Award winners I found a bunch of different categories related to animation but the one that caught my eye was the award for Outstanding Achievement in Main Title and Graphic Design.

I decided to look into this category more because it relates to our current project about graphics and opening title sequences. A bunch of people were posting about interesting opening title sequences so I figured why not follow with the theme and post the title sequence that won an award at the Emmys.

Anyway, this year’s winner was a PBS show called “Avec Eric”. It is a cooking show in which Chef and Co-owner of top NYC restaurant Le Bernardin gives the viewer an inside look at the lifestyle of a great chef while also teaching them how to make meals that “achieve four-star simplicity and elevate our own food experiences”. I looked up some of his recipes and they look pretty fancy and pretty delicious!

I had no idea what to expect when I looked up the winner in this category. I figured maybe it would be graphics from a news program or an intense drama. I definitely was not expecting a PBS news show. Below, I have posted a video that shows off the winning opening title sequence. I think it is a pretty interesting and creative opening and I can definitely see elements in it that could be created using After Effects. Maybe they actually used After Effects to create it-I’m not sure. Have a look yourself:

The creators of this sequence definitely deserve credit for their work so here is a list of the people credited with creating the opening titles as well as the producers of the show as listed on the Emmy’s website:

Nikelle Orellana, Graphic Artist


Kevin Lyons, Creative Director - Graphics


Justin V. Barocas, Executive Producer 


Eric Ripert, Co-Executive Producer/Creative Director

Andrew Loevenguth, Anomaly Producer/Titles and Graphics

Marco Spier, Co-Director for PSYOP Motion Graphics

Lutz Vogel, Co-Director for SPYOP Motion Graphics

Justin Booth-Clibborn, Executive Producer/Co-Director for PYSOP Motion Graphics

If you are interested in watching the show full episodes can be found on HULU.

More on Opening Titles

While looking around at different articles about opening sequences, I came across this article entitled '20 Brillant TV Show Title Sequences'. A lot of the links are disabled, so you have to look them up on youtube, but these really are some fantastic opening credits. Gone are the days when show openers consisted of a song that (sometimes) fits the theme of the show alongside the name and pictures of each of the cast members. The listed credits in the article range in dynamic, from Desperate Housewives to Six Feet Under and in difficulty, from Lost to The Unted States of Tara. If anyone still hasn't decided on a show opener they want to recreate, you should check out some of these!

As noted in class, I decided on recreating the opening for How I Met Your Mother:



As I was watching the sequence on youtube however, I stumbled a few mashups that people created of two different shows, for example the following is credits for Buffy the Vampire Slayer, HIMYM style:


The common denominator between the two shows is obviously Alyson Hannigan, but I thought it was interesting how this person tried to pick characters from Buffy that fit into the roles of characters from HIMYM.
I also noticed that this sequence had a little camera work with the pictures wiggling, but no 3D effects with the camera like the actual HIMYM opening.


Finally, I really enjoyed this HIMYM, Friends style opening. There were quite a few of this combination, but this was by far the best one:

Recreation Project Ideas

So I'm kind of having a hard time coming up with something doable for this project. The titles and ads I come across are either too complicated or too simplistic. Right now I have in mind a few things. I have the opening credits of North by Northwest, but I feel like it might be too simple. They also rotoscoped the lines to make them fit the window, but since I don't have that footage, I'm not sure what I'd do. Then I thought of the Psycho opening credits, which are also designed by Saul Bass (like those of North by Northwest), but because it doesn't involve images or anything other than titles and line animations, it might still be too simplistic.

But then I thought of this, and I think it might work. It's a narrated Flash of a horrible, misspelled review of a Flash online game, and even thought it was made in Flash, I think it's entirely possible to do in After Effects. I think that's what I'm going to do. Now I just have to figure out the elements in it (I think most of it is text, but I'll have to watch it again).

Kiss Kiss Bang Bang Titles

So after seeing a few posts about opening credits, I tried to think of any other opening title sequences that really stuck out to me in the past. The opening titles from Kiss Kiss Bang Bang (Robert Downey Jr's in it) was the first one I came up with.

Overall, the movie itself was just okay (I had a really high fever when I was watching it, so maybe my judgment was skewed), but I thought the opening titles were really cool. I liked the orange cut-out theme, with the camera moving through the cut-outs to make it 3D, and you can definitely make a title very similar to this using the camera tool in AfterEffects and images that you can zoom past/pan around, etc. In one of the Basic Training videos, Andrew actually teaches you how to make a title sequence where you see one layer of text and zoom past it in 3D space to get to another layer of text. The KKBB credits seem like a more complex version of that, with some line/texture animations thrown in. I really like the camera tool on AfterEffects, and I'd like to use it in my title project, but we'll see how that goes. I've been trying a few ideas and I haven't really been satisfied with any of them so far.

Back to the video- I just looked into the background of it a little more, and apparently the creative director behind the movie is Danny Yount, who has also done title design for Iron Man and storyboarding for Across the Universe. The style of the credits is along the lines of Saul Bass' style.