Titles design for film Thesis project

So, this week I thought I'd just share some screen shots from a title animation I am doing for a friends Thesis film . The piece is a stop motion animation titled "Stick it to the Pattern," with the pun in the title meaning exactly what you think. I started out by developing a concept for each the beginning and ending credits with the filmmaker (Siobhan Cvanagh, if you know her) and then working from there. Since there is a major shift within the attitude of the characters from the beginning and end, we both agreed that the titles should reflect this shift. So for the opening credits, which I have posted a few images of, we wanted to reflect the concept of rigid and exact patterns in the film. The look of the titles is supposed to reflect that of an old-school computer screen, which is actually one of the characters in the film. At first I was just going to use techy looking font but after a long (and worthwhile) discussion with Arturo I decided to bite the bullet and build each individual letter out of blocks. The advantage of doing it this way, however tedious it may be, is that I can now animate the blocks to at first appear random and then eventually form the words of the title sequence. The first image on here will be the last frame in the sequence and is an image identical to the pattern the factory workers in the film are forced to stick to, and subsequently eventually "stick it to". Although this project has already taken up a considerable amount of my time, it is one that I know I will be really proud of once it's finished. I would promise to post it on here once it's finished, but I think it would be more fun to wait to see it on the big screen at out screening, don't you?

Saul Bass

This is another Saul Bass compilation where you can probably find more movies that you have heard about or probably seen. The idea in any case is to detect the influence of this designer in many other title sequences that you can see today.

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.