Title Sequences

The title sequence of a film is a very important factor, it gives the audience a sense of how the film will be unveiled and the genre. I looked at previous title sequences and trailers to research what has worked affectively and how we can input some of these ideas into our own titles.

I looked at Inception and the way it starts with the Warner Brothers logo in the Inception style building look. Then the titles begin to appear in silver writing with a black background, a bang is hear as each title appears to create a sense of the film's genre and to keep the audience on edge. Short flashes of images are shown from various places in the film in between the titles. A totem is shown to symbolically reflect its importance of it throughout the film, then a bird's eye view of buildings and then a shot of Leonardo Dicaprio which would be the film's USP, giving it prestige from the very beginning. After this there is a shot of a man being dragged away and it fades out but is made to look like an eye is shutting over the image, this looks very affective to the audience as it opens questions. The eerie music represents the thriller and the caption appears 'Your mind' then separately 'Is the scene of the crime' this connects the audience and makes them feel a part of the film already. Some more shots of the film are shown, along with a clock ticking and then the camera pans quickly across buildings and rises up to show the title 'INCEPTION' outlined within the buildings. This works very well with the film and although we do not use buildings, we could use this technique with trees or other surroundings at out chosen location.

I also looked at the trailer for 'Orphan'. There are some parts of it we could incorporate into our thriller as this film and our thriller opening are both using a child. First of all it starts with just clips from the film which we cannot use as ours is just an opening not a trailer but some of the shots would be very useful. There is a close up shot of swings squeaking and then the chains of the swing squeaking past each other, ours is set in a park so this would be very useful without thriller. There are also voices in the background and as we are using a nursery rhyme within our soundtrack this has helped for research. There are voice captions such as 'There's something wrong with Ester' which creates suspense and mystery for the audience. Pleonastic sounds of bangs joined with eerie music create a thrilling atmosphere.

It ends with a white background emphasising the false innocence with black writing encrypting 'Orphan' with the character Ester singing 'That's the story of, that's the glory of love' in a slow, creepy voice which contradicts the usual connotations of the song and replaces it with the scary affect for the audience.