Homework for 18/11/10

http://www.smashingmagazine.com/2010/10/04/the-art-of-the-film-title-throughout-cinema-history/: I picked five things from this website that I personally found interesting.

1. 'Words and lettering played an enormous role in films of the silent era.'

I found this interesting because nowadays words and lettering are not very significant. It is also shows how important words and lettering's were to a film and how they only depended on that for their films during the silent era.

2. 'Film titles and letter cards had to provide essential information to the viewer. For reasons such as ease of production and clarity, artists favored mono-stroke letterforms or characters with small serifs. White lettering on a black background is another characteristic of this era, because titles simply looked better this way when projected with live-action B&W film.'

I found this of interest to me because they did not really use much colour in their film which I found rather strange because in films these days we use colour to evoke a lot of ideas within a film. This shows the simplicity of their films.

3. 'Hollywood animation studios, including Warner Brothers and MGM, did give some license to their artists to indulge in title antics. But one can also see that life for the titling crew at Disney was strained by the weight of its foreign-language versions and that film exports rarely encouraged innovation in titling.'

I found this interesting because it seems surprising to me how the films exports would not really let their titling crew introduce something new to titling.

4. 'As much as possible, they liked to convey the tone of a movie through the “dressage” of its main title. Thus, blackletter fonts in the opening credits were used to evoke horror, ribbons and flowery lettering suggested love, and typography that would have been used on “Wanted” posters connoted a western flick.'

From this statement it shows me how the "dressage" of main titles have changed since that time because, nowadays we can usually tell the genre of the film by the music.

5. Breakthrough ideas in titling, such as timing the typography to interact with metaphorical imagery or to create its own world, were largely innovations that came from outsiders to the Hollywood studio system.

This statement explains the breakthrough in titling.