Movie Title Sequences

Roman Mars:
This is 99% Invisible. I’m Roman Mars.

[If I was a flower growing wild and free,
all I’d want is for you to be my sweet honey bee.
And if I was a tree growing tall and green,
all I’d want is you to shade me and be my leaves.]

Roman Mars:
So a teenage girl named Juno is walking down the street, with the half-empty one-gallon jug of Sunny D citrus beverage in one hand. She passes a tree and everything becomes animated. It’s kind of a lo-fi, unpolished xerox copy animation, inspired by punk rock music fliers.

Roman Mars:
“So how long did you have that main title music from Juno stuck in your head? It’s still there, isn’t it?”

Gareth Smith:
“Yeah, I think so. You know what? They’re still using it on some commercial these days, and when I heard it, I just got flashbacks. It was crazy.”

[If I was a flower growing wild and free,
all I’d want is for you to be my sweet honey bee.
And if I was a tree growing tall and green,
all I’d want is you to shade me and be my leaves.]

Roman Mars:
The title sequence immediately establishes Juno’s quirky world view.

Roman Mars:
“You cut your title sequences to music, so you must live with these songs for months at a time, right?”

Gareth Smith:
“Yes. As a title designer, it’s very important that the music you use in a sequence is something that you love, that you really enjoy working with, because it can be rough otherwise.”

Gareth Smith:
My name is Gareth Smith and I am a film title designer.

Roman Mars:
Gareth and his partner Jenny Lee did the titles for “Juno” and “Up in the Air,” among others.

Ian Albinson:
My name is Ian Albinson and I am the founder and editor-in-chief of “Art of the Title,” a website that curates title design.

Roman Mars:
Ian’s site is awesome.

Ian Albinson:
It’s a completely different set of people that do the work-

Roman Mars:
That do title sequences.

Ian Albinson:
People don’t always realize that. And always seem to be always surprised that, oh, someone actually thought about this and someone actually gets paid to design and work on something so separate from the film, yet something so connected to the film.

Roman Mars:
Fundamentally, a title sequence is a presentation of a legal document to the audience.

Gareth Smith:
It’s a list of names of the crew and actors and everything, who are associated with the film.

Roman Mars:
And then there’s the more interesting and artistic reason for the title sequence-

Gareth Smith:
Which is establishing tone and perhaps a storyline.

Roman Mars:
But there are rules.

Gareth Smith:
When you’re doing a studio film, the designer or the company will get a document that’s maybe ten to fifteen pages long.

Roman Mars:
If you just wrote out the text of the title sequence, it could fit easily on a single page.

Gareth Smith:
But of course, it’s this fifteen-page document, and beside each title, there’s several paragraphs of text about how each title needs to be treated.

Roman Mars:
Like maybe in some sequences, the lead two actors require their names to be bigger than the other titles.

Gareth Smith:
And they’ll actually list in the document the exact percentage size that it needs to be bigger than the other titles in the sequence. So it’s very specific, and as a designer, it gets very frustrating and challenging to deal with this because it feels very limiting to need to have every single title in the sequence be exactly the same size.

Roman Mars:
When it comes to innovation and influence in title design, there are two words you need to know: Saul Bass.

Ian Albinson:
He was a major benchmark in terms of realizing that you could have good design in a title sequence.

Gareth Smith:
When Saul Bass came along, he was a designer that started to work on more promotion for films and then started to bring his illustration and design style to films. He worked with Hitchcock on a number of pieces.

Roman Mars:
If the title sequences of Saul Bass don’t immediately spring to mind, do yourself a favor and google “Anatomy of a Murder” or “Man with the Golden Arm” or “Psycho” or “Vertigo.” So good.

Gareth Smith:
What I love about some of his earlier title sequences is if you look at them, they’re basically animated film posters.

Roman Mars:
But a lot of that Saul Bass style faded away in the 80s.

Ian Albinson:
You know, in the 80s or the 90s, you started to get the branding idea with films. And so a lot of title sequences weren’t so much title sequences, but were just sort of the logo of the film. And so you’re creating the brand for the films, so you have “Back to the Future,” where it’s a very iconic logo design and you have a lot of that in late 80s and early 90s. You didn’t see as many complete opening sequences or title sequences, be them stand-alone or sort of intricated with the film.

Gareth Smith:
Which is not done very much these days. I don’t know if you’ve noticed it, but there are not a lot of films where there’s just a big logo that you see on the poster, you know?

Roman Mars:
But then we hit the second major benchmark. The movie “Se7en.” Its titles were created by Kyle Cooper.

Gareth Smith:
He sort of re-introduced the idea that the title sequence could be its own thing. Which is what Bass did decades earlier.

Roman Mars:
The title sequence of “Se7en” works as both a stand-alone vignette and a vital introduction to the grimy and obsessive feel of the movie. The serial killer in “Se7en” doesn’t appear until 2/3 of the way into the film, but you really get to know the killer right here in the first two minutes. Kyle Cooper took us inside his head

Gareth Smith:
The most memorable title sequences are really ones where, you know, there’s a great movie after it. If “Se7en” was put in front of some terrible movie that no one saw, it wouldn’t have moved on to influence a generation of title designers after it.

Roman Mars:
One of Ian Albinson’s favorite title sequences is another Kyle Cooper creation. “The Island of Dr. Moreau.” It was the one that kicked Ian in the head and made him start noticing titles in the first place. But if you were smart, you probably didn’t see “The Island of Dr. Moreau.” And you don’t know how cool the title sequence is. But every human on earth over the age of 20 knows the name of Gareth Smith’s favorite title sequence.

[“Cheers” theme song plays in background]

Gareth Smith:
The TV title sequence for “Cheers,” I can watch that endlessly. I remember liking it before I was a designer or had anything to do with design. So I was trying to put my finger on why I like it. And, of course, a great theme song on that title sequence makes a big difference, but it just has lovely typography, very simple lovely typography. And the editing of the sequences is fantastic. It just captures the entire tone of the television show in 30 seconds to a minute.

Roman Mars:
“Cheers” is a montage of historical drawings and photographs of people enjoying themselves in bars.

Gareth Smith:
And what they do underneath each of the title cards for the actors is that they actually find a historical image that does sort of “suggest” that character in the television series. The reason I enjoy it is warmth and friendship. And that really comes across, I think, in that title sequence.

[“Cheers” theme song fades out]

Gareth Smith:
There are a lot of fans of film title design out there. I was trying to figure out why that is and I feel like film title design, more than other sorts of design, has a bit of longevity because it is committed to film. Because, you know, a lot of design is commercial or prints and it kind of is designed to exist for a week or two weeks, and just to vanish from the face of the planet. Whereas film design, you really do have to think about “what is this going to look like in 25 years?” You hope that the movie you’re working on is going to be one of the movies that’s going to be seen many years from now, you know? And it has to kind of hold up over time.

Roman Mars:
99% Invisible was produced this week by me, Roman Mars, with support from Lunar, making a difference with creativity. It’s a project of KALW 91.7, local public radio in San Francisco, the American Institute of Architects in San Francisco, and the Center for Architecture and Design. For videos and links to all the titles we talked about in this episode, as well as a kickass montage of kickass titles edited together by Ian Albinson, go to the website. It’s 99percentinvisible.org.