Title Sequence Clips

 September 9th, 2020

    Those first few minutes, scenes, moments, and music when you start a movie sometimes gets overlooked and seen as just a few credits, but it sets up the whole movie. Opening scenes are crucial and important to the movie as it is basically the first impression to us as the audience. In 'First Frames in the digital realm," Merril states, “An opening titles sequence generally engages with the big themes of the film and looks at overarching themes and metaphors of the film.”  When a movie begins playing there is a sequence of events and frames that happen in a very specific order to help build emotion at the beginning of a movie. Movies that were made 10-20 years ago and sometimes even earlier spanning from all genres have used the opening scenes and frames to build character portfolio, foreshadowing, suspense, emotion, and the plot that sets the stage for the movie.

    Some movies utilize different cinematic elements to enhance the presence of the beginning of the storyline in relation to the specific movie. As seen in the movie “Scream” many different elements were incorporated to make those opening moments captivating and mesmerizing to draw the audience in. ‘Scream’ starts with loud background screams with the large red bold letters spelling out Scream, then the shot changes to someone alone in their house getting ready to watch a horror movie when someone keeps calling even when the character tells them to stop. These opening scenes are constantly building suspense with this character alone at home with someone stalking her on the phone. Then if we make a movie like the ‘Lion King’ into consideration, which is a polar opposite to a horror like ‘Scream’, ‘The Lion King’ opens the movie with a powerful and cultural song being sung as the sun rises on a new day, the song then begins to mellow out as it shows all the animals being drawn to one specific area and them all moving towards that direction. The music then picks up and becomes more powerful emphasizing the coronation and recognition of the new prince lion that has just been born. The baby is then shown to the entire savannah of animals where they all rejoice and then bow to the future king. The song elements of both movies build the foundation so much, in ‘Scream’ background screams and suspense music was played to increase fear and suspense, but in ‘The Lion King’ a cultural song is played highlighting the African setting and animal kingdom. These examples shows how the same element can be shaped in different ways to captivate and engage the audience.

Certain movies highlight foreshadowing the future as seen in the movie ‘Pulp Fiction’ where the main characters seem a little off but pretty normal, then the husband proposes the idea of conning everyone here like they have done before, then they both get wild and stand up and start mugging everyone in the restaurant yelling that if they move they will be shot. This highlights their criminal background as well as how quickly they can change.

    Other movies highlight a different element which is character and plot development as seen in both ‘Dazed and confused’ and ‘Trainspotting’ both of these movies show different people wanting to escape life in one case the real world and the other school, both groups of characters use drugs to do this. This builds the character portfolio that they are naturally a little worse than others as well as potentially mischief throughout the movies. 

    As of right now, I’m interested in potentially choosing to create a movie introduction. I want to do this because of its creative aspects. As seen in ‘First Frames in the digital realm’, “digital technology enables you to puff apart and put together a photographic image, now that video is being delivered interactively”. However, I’m also interested to see what the magazines may look like and are also very intrigued in what may be enlisted in those projects.

Mckenzie King, P.3