Title Sequences Research Articles

Why not make it move?

<p>El texto revisa el legado de Saul Bass, grafista seminal en la historia de la comunicación y responsable indiscutible de la incorporación del diseño de títulos de crédito como disciplina relevante, desde su desaparición —hace veinte años— hasta nuestros días. Se analizan los recursos gráficos de su lenguaje visual y cómo han trascendido en el uso —casi cotidiano— aplicado a soportes gráficos para la edición. También se hace hincapié en el diseño contemporáneo de secuencias de títulos de estas dos décadas y cómo los lenguajes audiovisuales de la actualidad han asumido las aportaciones de Bass. En esta revisión reciente tratamos de obviar los nombres conocidos, adentrándonos en ciertos trabajos que nos ayudan a pensar que el legado del gran maestro sigue vivo.</p>

ChemInform Abstract: Diversity‐Oriented Approach to Natural Product Inspired Pyrano‐Carbazole Derivatives: Strategic Utilization of Hetero‐Diels—Alder Reaction, Fischer Indolization and the Suzuki—Miyaura Cross‐Coupling Reaction.

AbstractStarting from 1,3‐diones, styrene derivatives, and formaldehyde the three‐step title sequence provides architecturally complex pyrano‐carbazole derivatives without the requirement of lengthy protective group strategies.

ChemInform Abstract: Stereoselective Retentive Domino Transmetalations of Secondary Alkyllithium Compounds to Functionalized Secondary Alkylcopper Reagents.

AbstractThe title sequence follows the conditions A)—D) where the starting substrates have a defined stereochemistry with a high d.e.

Victorian London Redux: Adapting the Gothic Metropolis

This article focuses on the reimagining of Victorian London central to two recent, high-profile television adaptations, NBC / Sky Living’s Dracula (2013–14) and Showtime / Sky Atlantic’s Penny Dreadful (2014–). Paying attention to the series themselves and paratextual forms such as posters and title sequences, the article argues that both productions are more interested in responding to the popular Victorian Gothic image of the city than in carefully reconstructing a straightforward facsimile of nineteenth-century London. It shows, in fact, that this adaptation of the Victorian cityscape is presented in heightened, performative terms. Dracula and Penny Dreadful’s self-conscious approach to their Victorian London settings is related, on a textual level, to the playfully anarchic response of these adaptations to their literary sources and characters. More generally, it reflects recent contextual developments affecting the practice of adapting nineteenth-century texts.

From Saul Bass to participatory culture: Opening title sequences in contemporary television series

From Saul Bass to participatory culture: Opening title sequences in contemporary television series

A Book About the Film ‘Monty Python and the Holy Grail’: All the References from African Swallows to Zoot by Darl Larsen

Darl larsen, A Book About the Film 'Monty Python and the Holy Grail': All the References from African Swallows to Zoot. Lanham, MD: Rowman & Littlefield, 2015. Pp. xxxii, 597. isbn: 978-1-4422-4553-2. $50.Perhaps you are such a fan of the 1975 film Monty Python and the Holy Grail that you have participated in one of the many late-night quote-along showings at theaters around the country. Perhaps you have a shelf of action figures from the film, wear a t-shirt with its graphics and play the computer game based on it. Perhaps you have purchased the special 40th anniversary DVD 'castle edition' which includes a catapult and rubber farm animals. If so, have I got a book for you! If one were to absorb its 533 unillustrated pages of text (with its forty-five page index and seventeen page bibliography), the experience could serve as a graduate course in the film. However, to make full use of this work-which is a gloss on the entirety of the movie, scene by scene, from the opening animated title sequence to 'Scene Thirty-Seven: Stop the Film'-the reader would ideally have at hand a DVD with a pause button as well as a copy of the script published in 1977. This reviewer admittedly did not, but extensive sampling, sometimes at random, sometimes by design, is similar to the experience of users who will turn to it as a research guide rather than read it from beginning to end.Larsen is a professor of film and certainly one of the most devoted experts on the comedy troupe. He has published a similar reference book on the Monty Python Flying Circus television series, as well as a study entitled Monty Python, Shakespeare and English Renaissance Drama. He takes pains in his introduction to treat the film from a critic's perspective, discussing it as a medieval film (sort of ) and as an art film (or parody thereof ). He is not a medievalist, and he apologizes to those who are for 'playing in their yard' (xiii), but his interest in the Middle Ages is in how it is portrayed by the Pythons-Oxbridge educated comic actors with a bent for social satire who are living in a Britain stuck in the economic and social misery of the 1970s. The search for 'informing sources' (xiv)-what the Pythons might have had in mind creating the film-is really what the book is all about. The problem is that there's not always a record of what they had in mind, and identifying the sources of the filmmakers sometimes requires speculation, questionable associations, curious choices, and some irrelevant and even bizarre digressions.Proceeding through the film from start to finish, characters, incidents, imagery, even bits of dialogue (some occurring only in the printed script), are explicated in commentaries which sometimes enlighten but sometimes baffle. In 'Scene Four: Bring Out Your Dead,' the visual setting is related to the accumulation of garbage in London in the early 1970s due to union strikes. …

Film Title Sequences and Widescreen Aesthetics

Abstract

Music and Levels of Narration in Film: Steps Across the Border by Guido Heldt (review)

Music and Levels of in Film: Steps Across Border. By Guido Heldt. Bristol: Intellect, 2013. [x, 290 p. ISBN 9781841506258 (hardcover), $64.50; ISBN 9781783202096, 9781783202102 (e-book), various.] Illustrations, bibliographic references, filmography, index. During a period of rapid development in film musicology, Guido Heldt's Music and Levels of in Film: Steps Across Border offers a timely investigation of music's many narratological roles in film. study builds upon earlier literature in field and makes a useful reference tool for both film and music scholars due to division of its five chapters into several categories and subcategories. Chapter 1, Introduction: Film Music Narratology, provides a general overview of book's structure and author's main arguments. Heldt first considers narratology within film medium as a whole before applying a narrower focus on film music specifically--an approach he applies consistently in text. By drawing narratological connections between film and music, Heldt highlights latter's integral role in a movie's basic structure. Most importantly, he makes it clear that music must not be restricted to limited labels of diegetic and non-diegetic so commonly employed in contemporary scholarship, which is a concept he expands upon with his analytic approach in chapter 2. Brimming with information, chapter 2, The Conceptual Toolkit: Music and Levels of Narration accounts for nearly 50 percent of book's length and tackles everything from extrafictional music in title sequence to metadiegetic narration and focalization. Throughout chapter Heldt considers traditional labels of diegetic and nondiegetic music and warns against a strict reliance on these terms. Rather, he reinforces significance of what he calls fuzzy areas of film music, or music that does not fit neatly into either above-mentioned category. Discussing, among others, such concepts as would-be-diegetic music, music's attachment to story-world, and displaced diegetic music, Heldt moves systematically through many different levels of musical narration, further reinforcing medium's crucial role in film. Moreover, Heldt offers several examples that demonstrate each concept (an effective technique he employs frequently in book), which brings these distinctions to life. Keeping this in mind, however, this study is written for a rather specific audience. It is clear that Heldt has a deep understanding of previous literature on both film and film music narratives, which he incorporates heavily into his book; in fact, he does an exceptional job of integrating less familiar French and German scholarship on subject as well. While this expansive knowledge adds depth to his work, reader would greatly benefit from having a strong familiarity with literature in order to fully appreciate Heldt's arguments. In remaining chapters, author applies his conceptual toolkit from chapter 2 to three case studies. Chapters 3 and 4 focus on narratological aspects of music in musicals and horror films respectively, while chapter 5 demonstrates how musical narrativity can span length of an entire film. Beginning with chapter 3, Breaking into Song? Hollywood Musicals (and After), Heldt discusses classic Hollywood's diverse approaches to musical: at one end, musical were hardly integrated into narrative and characters sporadically broke into song; on other end, musical were purely diegetic and often performed on a stage, especially with backstage musicals. Following this discussion, Heldt explains how Mark Sandrich's musical Top Hat (1935), avoids the strangeness inherent in genre, and instead mediates carefully between story-world and numbers by employing informal stages such as hotel ballrooms, alleys of Venice, and bandstands (p. 141). With his investigation of Top Hat, author not only makes use of his analytic approaches from chapter 2, but also prepares reader for remaining examples in chapter 3 which, on surface, appear to abandon or distance themselves from genre's traditional style. …

ChemInform Abstract: Efficient One Pot Multi‐Component Domino Aldol Condensation—Michael Addition—Suzuki Coupling Reaction for the Highly Functionalized Quinolines.

AbstractThe title sequence allows the synthesis of highly functionalized quinolines via three‐ component reaction of 2‐chloro‐3‐formylquinolines, acetophenones, and boronic acids.

Projecting the title

Since early cinema, writing has most often been conceived of as distraction, as noise that interrupts the natural flow of images. After the invention of sound it was marginalized in the fiction film, literally. We encounter writing at the beginning and ending of films as paratextual credits. Here, writing is used to differentiate levels of narration. The written paratext functions as a frame for the enclosed story. But the relationship between writing, paratext, and film is never fixed, but always open for debate. This article demonstrates the complexity of this constellation by pointing out how title sequences articulate different conceptions of film. The conflictual relationship between film and writing sheds light on how film has constantly redefined and reinvented itself.

From Altered States to Altered Titles: A Close Analysis of the Title Sequence to Ken Russell's Altered States (1981)

Although most title sequences of Ken Russell's films consist of superimpositions of a static text on film images, the elaborate title sequence to Altered States (1981) was specially designed by Richard Greenberg, who had already acquired a reputation for his innovative typography thanks to his work on Superman (1978) and Alien (1979). Greenberg continued these typographic experiments in Altered States. Although both the film and its title sequence were not personal projects for Russell, a close analysis of the title sequence reveals that it functions as a small narrative unit in its own right, facilitating the transition of the spectator from the outside world of the cinema to the inside world of filmic fiction and functioning as a prospective mise-en-abyme and matrix of all the subsequent narrative representations and sequences of the film to come. By focusing on this aspect of the film, the article indicates how the title sequence to Altered States is tightly interwoven with the aesthetic and thematic structure of the film, even though Russell himself may have had less control over its design than other parts of the film.

Chariots of FireRerun: Locating Film's Cultural Capital on a Contemporary Stage

The title sequence of Chariots of Fire – filmed on the West Sands beach of St Andrews, Scotland – has become one of the most reworked and reinterpreted moments of British cinema, transposed across a variety of places, politics and times. In exploring these moves – from the period of its setting in 1924, through its production in 1980, and to its most recent reworkings in the London 2012 Olympics – the article examines the constantly evolving legacies of the sequence and the cultural capital which it has accrued via these various contexts. By considering the original production and its subsequent multiple receptions, the article positions the sequence at the vanguard of shifts in film production and cultural heritage. Viewed from the vantage point of the 2012 Olympics, the film provides an integral source of cultural capital not just for national but also for local and regional economies as they increasingly target new sources of revenue in a post-industrial age.

디즈니 장편애니메이션 타이틀 시퀀스 분석

디즈니 장편애니메이션 타이틀 시퀀스 분석

When We Go to War: Multimodality and Film Title Design

AbstractFilm titles are distinctive paratextual artefacts that while supporting and normally prefiguring a film or television series, orchestrate unique modes of address into an expression of identity. These multimodal texts have a bifurcate function. First they establish the film’s title and list the primary creative and management team behind the production. In addition, they can also become unique expressions that interpret the ethos of a film. As such they increasingly stand as appreciable design works in their own right. This article considers the design process and eventual form of a 45-second title sequence developed for the six-part television drama series

The calligram and the title card

AbstractThe design of motion picture title sequences in 1930s Hollywood employs one of two approaches: (1) superimposed text where the background is independent of the typography, (2) the integration of the type and background imagery to produce a single, composite effect. The title design for the 1936 film

“I Get a Bad Taste in My Mouth Out Here”: Oil's Intimate Ecologies in HBO's <em>True Detective</em>

The first season of HBO’s popular series True Detective (2014), set in rural Louisiana, has garnered critical attention due to its postmodern sensibilities, postsecular metaphysics, and its star-studded cast, yet the show’s navigation of the industrial Gulf Coast remains under-examined. This essay focuses on what creator Nic Pizzolatto designates the “third lead” of the show—the poisoned landscapes of Louisiana’s ubiquitous petroleum industry. In a narrative that ostensibly invokes the Southern Gothic to cast its fictional corruption as regional peculiarity, the omnipresent spectacle of the petro-industrial complex implicates transnational networks of capital in the region’s “slow violence.” In this way, True Detective’s oily aesthetic provides a crucial framework through which to examine the ecologies of violence sustained by oil capitalism. Drawing on materialist ecocriticism such as Timothy Morton’s “dark ecology” and Stephanie LeMenager’s “petromelancholia,” this essay argues that True Detective’s visual emphasis on oil, which emerges most provocatively in the main title sequence, offers a crucial aesthetic strategy for representing the ambivalent pleasures and anxieties of US fossil-fuel modernity. As images of bodies and oil continually entangle through superimposition and dissolve, True Detective mobilizes a queer intimacy of human and environment that insists on apprehending petromodernity through its making and unmaking of identities.

The signification of visual text appeared in film title sequences of Saul Bass

The signification of visual text appeared in film title sequences of Saul Bass

Creative Titles

After discussing the relationship of title sequences to Genette’s concept of the paratext, along with the definition of the film as text, this article provides an historical contextualisation of a sub-genre of the Italian industrial film characterised by musical and audiovisual experimentation, which arose in the years of the economic miracle (1958–63), flourished throughout the 1960s and came to an end in the early 1970s. The article goes on to analyse some significant examples, exploring three main issues: the relationship of title sequences to a film’s structure, their semantic and rhetorical strategies with particular attention to self-reflexivity, and finally their impact relative to the audience’s experience.

Geopolitics, Gender, and Genre: The Work of Pre-Title/Title Sequences in James Bond Films

IntroductionAlmost since inception of Bond series, one of most recognizable features of films has been opening sequences. From now iconic images of a male figure (Bond) seen through barrel of a gun to un- dulating female bodies, pre-title/title se- quences mark screen in ways that are both familiar and enticing to viewers. The pre-title sequence of Cold War classic From Russia with Love (1963), for example, second film in James Bond series and first to deploy pre-title/title formula, opens with a shot of Bond seen through a gun barrel that then gives way to figure of 007 walking guard- edly through a formal garden in dead of night. A man sneaks up on Bond and strangles him to death with a thin wire. At this moment, exterior lights illuminate garden to reveal a large mansion with many people standing around. The agent is congratulated for his rapid kill, and then a mask is peeled from dead body to reveal that it is not Bond who has been slain-the exercise was simply a practice ses- sion for agent. The scene then cuts to title sequence, where credits are projected onto shimmying bodies of women in belly dancer costumes.1 In almost every subsequent Bond film, sequences function similarly, introduc- ing film's hero and its broader gender poli- tics as well as security threat that Bond will thwart. In each new installment of series, these high-impact, fast-moving pre-title/title sequences refer back to previous Bond films, forging intertextual linkages. At same time, pre-title/title sequences serve both di- egetic and metonymic functions, re-presenting real international politics and global security threats within a normalizing male hegemony.Despite their obvious relevance to Bond series viability, curiously little has been written on pre-titles and titles.2 This article seeks to fill this gap, exploring multiple functions of sequences in three of most recent Bond films, Die Another Day (2002), Casino Royale (2006), and Quantum of Solace (2008).3 These particular films are interesting because they mark (at time much-publicized) shift from Pierce Brosnan to Daniel Craig in role of James Bond and because they also signal changing risks presented by a turbulent international security situation. Taken together, these films not only provide a window into ways in which pre-title/title sequences anchor Bond series, they also offer a template for understanding power of genre in structuring filmic articulations of contemporary geopolitics and gender politics and discourses. After a brief discussion of title and pre-title sequences and role of genre in Bond films, we turn to an examination of geopolitics and diegetic contemporaneity as found in Die Another Day, Casino Royale, and Quantum of Solace. We then look more particularly at pre-title/title sequences and their generic, diegetic, and met- onymic functions, arguing that sequences, like films as a whole, telescope contempo- rary geopolitics and gender politics.Pre-Titles, Titles, and Generic ImaginingsIn Reading Title Sequence, Georg Stan- itzek points to complexity and multiple functions of title sequences. These functions are economic and legal (i.e., production and distribution credits), aesthetic (49), and spa- tial, facilitating transition from outside to inside and thus allowing viewers to engage film. This opening then is both integral and semi-autonomous (45) because of its struc- ture and because of extra-diegetic informa- tion that it provides. As Stanitzek writes, the title sequences come into being as an eminent space of cinematic intermediality (45). The title sequence of first Bond film, Dr. No (1962), acts as Stanitzek's article suggests, al- lowing audience to leave mundane ev- eryday and enter world of Bond. However, beginning with second film in series (From Russia with Love) title sequence is preceded by an action sequence that is inte- gral not only to threshold experience of viewing but also to establishing diegesis. …

‘And they all look just the same’? A quantitative survey of television title sequences

This article describes the variation in title sequences for American television series (a sequence of moving images and sound at the beginning of a television series). Using a quantitative survey of 50 contemporary fictional television series, it explores key features of the television title sequence – such as length, credits, characters, sound and style – and relates these to its functional characteristics. In so doing, the article provides a synchronic snapshot of a significant contemporary cultural product that viewers regularly engage with and enjoy. The survey not only shows the variation inherent in these cultural products, but also pinpoints areas that are worth investigating more closely and in depth.