Title Sequences

The title sequence of a film can be very important; it can even in some cases give us a subtle insight to the nature or themes of the film. So how exactly do filmmakers avoid boring the audience with cast and crew names fading around the screen?

On Her Majesty's Secret Service's Title Sequence

The Man With The Goldren Gun's Title Sequence

Goldfinger's Title Sequence

A particular website, 'Art of the Title' dedicates itself to "the artists who design excellent title sequences".
Some examples include 300, Lemony Snicket's A Series of Unfortunate Events and Casino Royale.
Keeping in mind James Bond films, the franchise has almost always used their title sequences in a way that depicts the topic of the film, 'Goldfinger' for instance shows women painted in gold as well as scenes from the film with a gold overlaying colour. A couple of the earlier Bond films also chose to reminisce on previous of the series' entries, as though to recap other of Bond's adventures. Whereas some simply chose to show silhouette's of women; an iconic image associated with Bond.

The artists behind these title sequences make them bearable with stylish imagery and dazzling colours. Perhaps most importantly is the theme song for the film; with the title sequences acting almost as an unveiling to the new Bond theme.

Many other title sequences from various films follow these traditions and incorporate their artistic style into the titles, affecting the fonts, music and imagery. A prime example being 'Juno'.

Just a handful of 900 still images composed to make Juno's title sequence.

Juno's title sequence went through a lot of work, including 900 still images of Ellen Page walking on a treadmill and drinking SunnyD. These images were then run through a Photocopier to degrade their quality and achieve the hand drawn look that the final sequence offers. Finally, they were physically cut out and scanned back into a computer on top of digitally drawn backgrounds to achieve this colourful, quirky stop-motion title sequence. Shadowplay, the studio behind the title sequence have had the pleasure of working on other Jason Reitman films including 'Thank you for Smoking' and 'Up in The Air'. The studio are good at what they do because they don't just write the names of the cast and crew across their titles, they treat the sequence as a separate project of its own, and therefore provide the audience with often colourful, unique approaches to title sequences.

Of course, with a time restriction of 5 minutes, we cannot afford to have a long title sequence, and so will effectively 'cram' our titles during the introduction of the film, after Ivy has woke up for the first time from her nightmare. Like most short films, we won't put too much emphasis on the title sequence except for the title itself.