Research : The Importance Of Opening Titles

Before considering what our opening titles would include and how it would be displayed in our short film, we felt it was necessary to do some extensive research on it . Doing this would allow us to understand how certain features of the titles will affect the overall outcome and atmosphere given to audience. When we acquire this knowledge it will tell give us a good idea of what to add to give a scary and horror like opening title.

When researching the importance of opening titles I first went onto the website http://www.artofthetitle.com then i looked at opening titles of several movies to get an idea of how they are presented and in which order they show the names of the people that were involved in the making of the film. This would give us an idea of what common opening titles are like which would help us to know what names should go first, how long, what font, colour and what size to make it.

I then went on watch the opening titles of the movie Se7en to do some further research on horror opening titles and learn how they are significant in films. This movie in particular would a clear idea and better understanding of how horror movies portray their opening titles in terms of font, size and colour, which would directly help us as that is the genre we are using for our opening.

I then took sheets of A4 paper to do my research

Next I wrote down every timestamp of when an opening title appeared on the movie Se7en. From this I learned how frequently the opening titles would appear in a horror movie's opening titles. I found that there were on average 1 title every 4 to 5 seconds and that all the main people involved in the movie were shown towards the beginning.

Next I explored the typography of opening titles in the movie Se7en by talking about the background, font colour, font type and size. From this I had learned that the style, colour and size of the font really makes a difference to the atmosphere of the movie.

Next I turned off the sound, watched the opening titles of Se7en again and with detailed described all the visual elements I saw excluding the titles themselves. From this I had learned that the things shown in between each title give a deeper meaning to the movie and gives you a brief idea of what the movie is like.

Next I watched the opening titles of Se7en without displaying the actual video and described everything I heard. From this I had learned that the sounds within a opening scene adds to the sense of movie, give an emotion to the audience and create a clear atmosphere of the movie to set the scene for the film ahead.