History Of The Title Sequence- Homework

Words and lettering played an enormous role in films of the silent era. Film titles made their appearance in the earliest silent films, along with letter cards (or inter-titles), which provided context. These cards were the responsibility of the lettering artist, who collaborated with the scriptwriter and director to create narrative continuity so that audiences could follow what they were seeing.

This is interseting beacuse it shows how important, the actual words were before sound came along. Speech and all sound in the film world was not used and dialouge was shown through the use of letter cards. This to me shows how important text was then because the whole film depended on the text to get the whole point of the storyline across.

During the 1920s and ’30s, European cinema was deeply influenced by modernism, and aspects of this visual sensibility were brought to the US by filmmakers who were fleeing the Nazis. Meanwhile, the studio systems operating in Europe and Hollywood also delighted in creating titles that featured vernacular graphic novelties. As much as possible, they liked to convey the tone of a movie through the “dressage” of its main title. Thus, blackletter fonts in the opening credits were used to evoke horror, ribbons and flowery lettering suggested love, and typography that would have been used on “Wanted” posters connoted a western flick.

This is intersesting because it shows that even when imagery in title sequences was new people still put alot of thought into the images that were shown, as it says above flowers were used to show love and the text from a wanted poster was used to symbolise a western. These are very early examples of the use of typography and Mis-en-Scene. and how they can affect a film even in the title sequence.

Breakthrough ideas in titling, such as timing the typography to interact with metaphorical imagery or to create its own world, were largely innovations that came from outsiders to the Hollywood studio system. Figures such as Saul Bass, Pablo Ferro, Maurice Binder and Richard Williams arrived on the scene in the 1950s, at a time when the studios were starting to flounder in their fight with TV. At that time, independent filmmakers made commercial headway by doing things differently, spreading utterly fresh ideas about the possibilities of title sequences. This is the era in which the discipline of film title sequence design was actually born

This is intersting as it shows that the film industry needed something new as if it wanted to keep up with the TV industry the film industry needed to change. this is when film titles began to change and influental designers like Saul Bass apperaed on the scene, and began to change and the title sequence actually became a pert in the film it was no longer just to announce that the film was starting.