Saul Bass & Kyle Cooper Research

Saul Bass & Kyle Cooper Research

Saul Bass

Saul bass was an American graphic designer and an academy award winning film maker. He is best known for his design on animated motion picture title sequences. He worked with some of Hollywood’s greatest film makers such as Alfred Hitchcock, Otto Preminger and Stanley Kubrick.
Saul Bass became notoriously famous for his work on the title sequence for the movie ‘the man with the golden arm’ as the film was so controversial Bass matched him controversy. This caused quite a sensation.
Bass had a couple of motto’s which he stuck to with every title sequence he made;
‘Design is thinking made visual’
‘My initial thoughts abut what a title sequence can do was to set mood and prime underlining core of the film’s story. To express the story in somemetaphorical 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 it.

Kyle Cooper

Kyle Cooper has directed over 150 film title sequences he is acclaimed as the most innovative and important designer of film titles since Saul Bass. He has a reputation as the most successful modern designer of motion picture title sequences.
Kyle Cooper was most famous for his work on Spider-man 3, Se7en, Speed racer and also the video game Metal Gear Solid.
As a film maker Kyle Cooper is all about passion. He only focuses on about two minutes of every movie so he is obsessive about every cut and every transition. He holds the title of royal designer for industry from the royal society of arts and is a member of the alliance Graphique Internationale.

About a Boy (Opening Sequence Analysis)

About a Boy (Opening Sequence)

Embedding disabled by request
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jJ8iLBSI-Po&feature=related

This film begins with a man walking into a room where a TV show ‘Who wants to be a millionaire’ is being shown on his television with the diagetic sound of the man’s dialogue telling a story in the background. In this scene a tracking shot from a high angle is used as if someone is watching him which may signify all eyes being on him as he may well be a celebrity. High key lighting is used in this scene to show how positive this man thinks his life is looking at the moment; it could also suggest that this man has a bright future ahead of him. The non-diagetic sound in this scene is that of an acoustic guitar playing at a fast paced, upbeat sort of tempo. The man fully enters the room and answers a question that was just asked on ‘Who wants to be a millionaire’ he insults the show saying that it is a “complete load of bullocks” this gives the viewers an idea of what kind of person this man actually is, as he begins speak his accent also adds to the stereotype of a posh, obnoxious, self centred man who doesn’t care about anyone else but himself.

He keeps pet fish as he is probably the type of person who has no time for a higher maintenance animal to take care of such as a cat or a dog. He gives the impression of a womanizer as he compares men to islands, this impression is enhanced when his answer machine goes off and a woman who he went out with the day before calls him to tell him how she think things went she describes the date as ‘great’, and asks him to give her a call. This man is confident, well-spoken and has a high opinion of himself, He continues to talk about himself and compares himself to an island where women are drawn to, he describes himself as cool, and Ibiza (an island holiday destination for many women).

The location changes to a boy lying on his bed facing the ceiling, another high angle shot is used to possibly show a connection between these two characters or some strange similarity. Low key lighting is used in this scene to show how negative this boy thinks his life is going at the moment; it also suggests that he doesn’t think things will change any time soon, this is enhanced by the use of the editing technique fading to show him in different places and show that time is going by and his life is still the same. The credits shown at the beginning of the film showed the title ‘About a boy’ where the words ‘about’ and ‘boy’ are emphasised however the letter the ‘a’ is not in bold. This signifies that this character feels less small and less important than everyone else around him as if the letter ‘a’ was replaced with the word ‘the’ and the title of the movie was ‘About the boy’ this would immediately give the impression that there is something special about this boy hence increasing his level of importance. The ‘a’ is also in between two words (‘about’ and ‘boy’); this could also signify that this boy feels isolated and lonely.

The boy describes himself as shy, and someone who doesn’t fit, he keeps a pet hamster which signifies that he is lonely and probably sees his hamster as the only living organism he can share his true feelings with as the hamster cannot speak, the hamster is probably the only thing he feels will not harm him with harsh words and will not even react to anything he says. The music used in this scene is still the same; however, when the boy begins his ‘diary’ the music is slower to signify his life as being slow and boring.

Prduction Log / Meeting

My Production Log



Meeting 1: Our initial idea was of us attending a drug counselling session, where we would individually be aksed about our addictions and how we wished to deal with them this required us to follow each indiciduals progress over time, we followed the actors through the ordeal and made it evident that they werent coping with this decision to give up whatever they were addicted to, Our second scene was of me (the addict), coming out of the session and talking about how 'things werent always like this', he showed emotion, and told a story of how he got into drugs in the first place

For our next scene, we shooted shots of me dealing with Myrin (the drug dealer) afterwards we showed the connection between our characters as after this scene we also showed Josephine (the addict) trying to get more drugs from Myrin, however, Myrin got angry and demanded that Josephine paid him his money from the last time she recieved drugs from him.

Meeting 2:
We went into college initially just to collect our equipment so we could carry on filming at another location; however we decided that we might as well start at college and shoot some shots which were not initially on our storyboards. This allowed us to film shots which we would later use to link up some of our later footage so that when it came to editing we would have various shots to choose from.

We filmed in and around the school building, this was useful as we could ask teachers for any additional information or equipment we could use to enhance our performance such as a boom which we could use to improve the quality of any dialogue we may include in our filming, and any ideas which our media technicians could assist us with.

Our first shot was of me hiding drugs inside my school locker we used a wide range of camera angles such as close ups, long shots and medium shots, we also came up with a great idea of placing the camera inside the locker itself and show me opening the locker and placing the bag of drugs inside. We redone a few of our shots over and over to ensure that we had enough to work with when we reached the editing stage. We put as much emphasis on the bag as possible to make it obvious to the audience that there is something in the bag which will in future affect the storyline.

Our second shot was an extreme long shot of Myrin sitting in the canteen of college this is used to show him as a very secretive character and that there may be something very sinister about him.

This idea was one which we decided we would not put forward as the storyline was not properly

thought out, and poor camera work made us fear re filming our whole short film all over again, we decided to start on another idea, however, decided to stick with the theme and genre of our short film but, we knew we had to come up with some more unique ideas if we were going to be able to create an opening sequence we were all proud of.

Meeting 3:

Josephine and Duane met up to start on our new ideas of our film the filmed a drug scence, Myrin and I were unable to attend this meeting, however, they were able to use some of

Josephine's friends to show a party scene where they were shown to be smoking and drinking, this scene was a great success which we used in some of our opening sequence.

they were able to mix flour and sugar to make a substance which was close to the appearance of cocaine.

Meeting 4:

Me, Myrin and Josephine met up at an estate round the corner from our college, we managed to film me walking into the estate where i was then confronted by Myrin who grabbed me and pushed me up against the wall, this gave clarity to the storyline and how it would be about drugs, crime and gang culture.

Meeting 5:

we stayed in college on this day to do some group work, we brainstormed our ideas for our titles which I would later be producing, we decided to go for a more dark and sisnister approach to our opening sequence, we decided on creating an 'enigma' which meant that we were not going to give away many answers in our opening sequence to the actual synopsis of our film but leave our audience asking many questions. We began to write down the names of the people in our group on paper and the names we would be including in our titles, for example, Producer, the editor, the costume designer, etc. So that I would know exactly what to work with when I was creating our opening sequence credits, and who I should show played which part in our short film.

we planned our opening sequence thinking long and hard about our location and what kind of message we wanted to put through to our audience.

The Ring (Opening Sequence Analysis)

The Ring (Opening Sequence)

The American remake of The Ring starts with a woman walking up a flight of stairs to find water dripping on the corridor floor. She approaches a door along the corridor and attempts to open it, placing her hand on the doorknob which the water appears to be dripping from. She enters the room to find a video playing...

The opening credits begin with the production company being the first name to be shown “DreamWorks studios presents” and the font used is quite disturbing, and so are the flashes of the various different scenes such as, chairs spinning by themselves trees, blood swirling around in a glass of water. The ring which is flashed a lot of the time in the opening credits makes the audience want to know what this movie is all about and what the ring has to do with it, the opening sequence has already left you in suspense. Even when they are showing people’s names like the director, producer and actors, it’s almost as if they’ve made sure that all of the people names that they show include a letter which requires a circle to be made when writing it, such as the letter ‘o’ , ‘b’, ‘g’, etc. That circular motion is always the last to disappear after the name has gone and you are just left with the imprint of a ‘o’ for a couple more seconds

The sounds used in the opening credits is low pitched and repetitive. However, as the music gets louder, more high pitched and includes more of a beat to it, the images seem to get even more disturbing. The credits are written on a dark background which gives you the impression that this movie is going to be very dark and eerie.

Different camera angles are used for effect, for example, at the very beginning when the woman is walking up the stairs the camera is low and taking a long shot, however as she reaches the of the stairs the camera doesn’t move and you can only she the woman’s legs as she walks along the corridor. She walks as slowly as physically possible to create maximum suspense, and as she steps in the puddle of water the camera changes to an extreme close up of the woman’s face to reveal her facial expressions whether she is happy or sad. At this stage her facial expression tells the audience that she is confused not so much scared at this point as she doesn’t really know what is going on, but as she opens the door she freezes and a screech from the video frightens her and as she is about to scream the camera zooms into her eye and many images appear, if you pause at the right times you may be able to see the image of a ring, a tree, a box containing fingers that have been cut off someone’s hand, before the video distorts and appears to come to an end as the screen goes fuzzy and the movie goes into the opening credits.