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The Film Titling Industry

Silent Films....Saul Bass·.

Kyle Cooper·.and beyond·.

Richard Matarazzo

IMA 505

Prof. Aievoli

The main-title sequence or the opening credits of a movie can be considered the most important piece in a film. Other than trailers and marketing elements, they are the first images the audience sees when the lights go down. These quick clips (all about two to three minutes) outline the filmmaker's intentions and set up the expectations of those watching. Saul Bass, a graphic artist in the film industry said, "making a main-title was like making a poster, you're condensing the event into this one concept, this one metaphor·a back-story that needs to be told or a character that needs to be introduced."

The pioneering work of Bass in the fifties and sixties and its revitalization by Kyle Cooper and Imaginary Forces in the nineties, have elevated the opening credits to an art form. The title sequence has come to rival commercials and music videos as the leading indicator of contemporary visual style: dense and multi-layered, constantly more challenging than the film that follows it. This paper will examine the creation of this new art form, follow it to our times, and make an estimate of whatâs to come for this fairly new form of art expression.

The earliest credit sequences were for silent films. Presented on title cards and containing printed material that were photographed and later incorporated into the movie. These cards also included the dialogue and set the time, place and action for the scenes. As the movie industry evolved, so did the titles. After the implementation of sound, titles began to function as a transition: taking on the responsibility of displaying the movie's title, the name of the director and establishing the hierarchy of actors. In the 1950s, titles began to move beyond realistic communication and evolved into complete narratives÷establishing the mood and visual character of the film.

ÊÊÊÊÊÊÊÊÊ Since then, the creation of film titles have changed dramatically. During the 90s a new wave of designers have elevated the art of film titles to a new phase ö desktop motion graphics. As technology of desktop computers advance at a rapid pace, design companies are able to create visually stunning motion graphics that had been by a big production house in the past. With faster processors and affordable compositing and editing softwares, designers assume a greater control in creativity.

Saul Bass was the industry's pioneer. His work spans 50 years, 60 films and dozens of corporate projects, with his most famous achievement ö the storyboards for Psychoâs shower scene ö also being his most controversial. Bass was born in 1929 in the Bronx. It has been said that Bassâs graphic work looked like what Matisse might have done if heâd grown up in the Bronx and had listened to jazz and wasnât so effete. When he was 15 he took painting courses at the Art Students League in Manhattan. He later attended Brooklyn College, where he studied with Gyorgy Kepes and was deeply influenced in his studies on the Modernist School of design. He worked at a number of ad agencies in the late 40s, and a stint with one agency that handled entertainment accounts in a conventional commercial way persuaded him that he would find greater creative opportunity on the West Coast. So in 1946 he moved to Los Angeles and founded Saul Bass & Associates. Bass was a design innovator in the corporate world with logos for AT&T, United Airlines, North American Rockwell, Minolta, Bell System, Continental, Frontier, Exxon, Wesson, Quaker, Alcoa, Lawryâs, Dixie. By 1950 he was designing publicity graphics for films. Up to that point, movie promotional art usually consisted of photographs or brightly colored pictures of stars, but Bass took a radically different approach, preferring instead to use dramatic abstract images, often comprised of interestingly arrayed lines, deceptively simple drawings and broken type to not only advertise the feature, but also to clue potential audiences in to the kind of story they were about to see. He created his first title design in 1954 for Otto Premingerâs Carmen Jones. Bass saw this as an opportunity to enhance the filmgoerâs experience. He didnât want to just have his sequence inform the audience, nor did he want to use the time to so some fancy graphical work that would show off his talents but add nothing to the film.

Saul Bass:

ãMy initial thoughts about what a title can do was to set mood and the prime underlying core of the filmâs story, to express the story in some metaphorical way. I saw the title as a way of conditioning the audience, so that when the film actually began, viewers would already have an emotional resonance with itä

Bass recognized the importance of a movieâs first moments. He invented the idea of titling movies ö either at the beginning or end ö with sequences that added something in a highly symbolic and evocative way and created print-graphic identification for films that not only title the film, but also serve to unify and drive entire marketing and advertising campaigns.

ãMotion picture photography was always about ten years behind,ä Saul said. ãThatâs what distinguished my initial work in films. I was bringing to bear the visual standards that I had developed in the graphic field. That was very startling, and thatâs what made the work I did then look so wild.ä

ãBass fashioned title sequences into an art, creating in some cases, like Vertigo, a mini-film within a film,ä said director Martin Scorsese. ãHis graphical compositions in movement function as a prologue to the movie ö setting the tone, providing the mood and foreshadowing the action.ä

Bassâs innovative work was responsible for launching a trend for filmmakers to employ animation and graphic designs in their credit sequences. Bass believed in maintaining creative control over everything he was involved in and was never shy about touting his achievements. The greatest lesson he taught was that a designer or any artist should never confine himself to a single endeavor or idea. He was eager to experiment, even if doing so risked disappointment.

Bass was awarded the U.S. Art Director of the year in 1957, he won an Academy Award in 1986 for his partially animated short film Why Man Creates, he was elected to the Art Directors Club of New York Hall of Fame in 1978, and in the early 90s he was honored with an exhibit at the Visual Arts Museum in New York.

ãSaul Bass practiced his craft for more than 50 years, yet his work was always consistently new and provocative,ä said designer Lou Dorfsman. ãHis work remains relevant because it continues to touch people and because his ideas and imagery appeal as much to the emotions as they do to the intellect.ä

He continued to work in film up until his death on April 25, 1996. He died from Hodgkinâsâ lymphoma. He was 75.

Since the recent death of the mediumâs acknowledged master, Saul Bass, thereâs one designer (and one key film), who has stood out from the rest as the next master of his field, Kyle Cooper. Cooper is as famous as a designer can be, winning dozens of awards, lecturing internationally, and receiving tons of media attention. The New York Times Magazine names Kyle Cooperâs ãSevenä title one of the most important design innovations of the 1990âs.Ê It has been said that ãhe almost single-handedly revitalized the entire film titling industry ö the scratchy, jittery acid-bathed glimpse of a twisted serial killer making his grisly preparations shocked audiences and drive clients to the door, but it also typecast Cooper as a sort of evil genius with a penchant for dark subject matter.ä

Cooper says, ãA main-title in its best form is like a prologue to a movie. Ideally, it sets you up for the emotional content of the film and gets you excited about it.ä

He goes on to say ã To watch a main title out of itâs context, without being a captive audience without having bought the popcorn and being in the theatre, ready to see the movie is a little unfair.ä ãI think a main title has to be really good to exist in this context separate from the movie itself.ä

In todayâs society if youâve watched television, seen a movie, or used Netscape to browse the Web, youâve seen the work of Kyle Cooper. Kyle Cooper studied at Yale under Paul Rand. He was drawn to Rand's graphic design; particularly the way he suggested motion in stasis. Cooper knew he wanted to design movie titles, but Rand discouraged him from doing his dissertation on the subject. Besides Rand, his influences include title designers like Robert Brownjohn (responsible for the classic silhouette-in-the-tunnel openings of early James Bond films like Goldfinger and From Russia with Love) as well as Saul Bass, the undisputed master.

After receiving his MFA in graphic design, Cooper headed to New York and started working on main titles with Robert and Richard Greenberg (R/Greenberg Associates). For ten years, he toiled in relative anonymity on some 70 projects. At R/GA he helped create stunning openers for blockbuster films like True Lies, and Twister. But Cooper was striving for a breakthrough. A little over two years later, Cooper spun off the L.A. division of R/Greenberg Associates along with two other partners, Peter Frankfurt and Chip Houghton. With 82 employees, Imaginary Forces has quickly established itself as one of the West Coastâs hottest shops, designing everything from Netscape Browserâs comet field logo to main titles for Mission Impossible and the Schwartzenegers thriller Eraser.

What might take Cooper and the crew at Imaginary Forces anywhere from a few weeks to eight months to design is over in the blink of an eye for movie audiences. Cooper offers a quote from Paul Rand ãArt is an idea thatâs found its perfect execution.ä But Rand also used to suggest that ãitâs good to work fast and itâs good to solve problems quicklyâ. For the audience itâs apparent that Kyle Cooper has been more successful than most at reconciling that dilemma.

The imaginary forces productions not only continue in the historic tradition of Saul Bass, but have brought the role of designers in cinema to the fore. Designers such as imaginary forces are not only involved in film production from the earliest stages but also become directors themselves of complex text-image narration. It is not surprising that their contributions have led to a renaissance in the art of film-titling and have gone on to influence the entire multimedia field.

With the art of film-titling still being fairly new it is hard to say what the future holds. As mentioned earlier, artists today are becoming even more involved in the projects and are expanding into different media. We are seeing this type of art form on the big screen, on television in the form of commercials and show openings, on the web as independent movies, animated graphics, website intros and designs, and last but not least we still see this type of design influence in corporate logos and print ads. Over the years, especially since the emergence of Kyle Cooper, the film titling industry has grown and grown to the point where it is now a standard for todayâs new films, shows, and websites. I believe that in the years to come as the internet keeps expanding and bandwidth increases, through the use of higher connection speeds and technology to view its content, the internet itself will be a main haven for digital artists to express them selves and their work in short films and animations. In an interview Kyle Cooper was asked about his thoughts about bringing this art form to the web:

When you're designing for the Web, how do you work around all the different bandwidth and browser constraints?

Kyle Cooper: ãI don't think about what the venue is when I'm designing in full motion. We did the Netscape logo animation, and when we were designing storyboards, I didn't think about the fact that it's going to be a half-inch square. To me, design is design--interactive design or Web design vs. main titles vs. commercials vs. live action.ä

There are different formats and parameters, but the criteria of trying to elicit an emotional response is relatively unchanging, whether you make a poster or you make a movie. I've made posters, and now I've directed my first movie and instead of being one frame it is many frames. But I'm still doing one frame at a time. Today everyone's talking about broadband and convergence. Well, convergence is something that designers have thought about all along.

Meaning?

Kyle Cooper: ÊãIt doesn't matter! Convergence doesn't matter. I'm glad we have movies on the Web now because people will realize that Web design is the same as film directing. Maybe that sounds irrational, but I think it's true. Sure, there are more parameters with film--you have to shoot live action and think about lighting and sound. On the interactive side, I have to know about Java or programming or whatever. But they're all just different parameters on solving a creative problem, to communicating something and eliciting an emotional response from someone that you've targeted.ä

ÊÊ

Motion design in opening credits is not a revolutionary process. Saul Bass pioneered the work, but Kyle Cooper incorporated the computer to improve on traditional and modern techniques. In doing so, he revitalized film industry titles and redefined their visual style. Main titles are often the last thing on a director's mind, and for producers they are generally something to get out of the way as cheaply as possible. As postproduction costs become less and less, the technology needed to produce these sequences is becoming more widespread and accessible. A second tier of designers÷those replicating style÷have started to emerge.

In an essay called "The Cult of the Scratchy," Jessica Helfland characterizes the state of contemporary film titles:

Scratchiness is a kind of celebration of the non-committal. It thrives on jumpy cuts and skewed perspectives as if the goal was anything but to stand still. This urge comes from a knee-jerk response to all things digital, borne out of a fear of projecting the unquestionably static history of your profession onto this seemingly new kinetic world. Such tactics speak of a level of cultural anxiety that has perhaps found its visual incarnation in the twitchy qualities of scratchiness.

Cooper's work is widely imitated by designers for film, television and multimedia. In Hollywood, if something works people tend to copy it÷and not just in films. Cooper is sensitive to the criticism that the "look" with which he is most closely identified has been replicated. His influence is unmistakable though. "Where to go from here?" he asks. "We're going back to modern typography. All the people who are just doing derivative, scratchy trash art that's not in the service of content are going to be left out in the cold."

Reference

SAUL BASS

www.digitalmediafx.com/features/saulbass.html

www.saulbass.net

www.filmzone.com/GenPlex/saulbass.html

www.gwisen.com/designer/bio3.html

www.saulbass.net/articles/maekmeatitle.html

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www.pittsburghlive.com/x/tribune-review/entertainment/movies/edblank/s_117260.html

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http://entertainment.msn.com/celebs/celeb.aspx?mp=b&c=261964

www1.gusu.edu/bowersm/link.html

PAUL RAND

www.commarts.com/CA/feapion_d/rand/

www.drleslie.com/Contributors/rand.shtml

www.dldesign.com/paul_rand/index.html

KYLE COOPER

www.du.edu/~aschreib/cooper.htm

www.design.fh-potsdam.de/fb4/projects/cutup/titledesign/titledesign01.html

www.mip.at/en/were/502-content.html

http://internet.design.curtin.edu/cashe/content.cfm?content=50

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http://216.239.33.100/search?q=cache:R-9as3mMbpIC:www.design.fh-potsdam.de/fb4/projects

http://www1.linkclub.or.jp/~mikworks/98/kcooper.html

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http://myweb.cwpost.liu.edu/paievoli/finals/505Sp_03/Prj2/MataP2.htm