“You know, like nunchuck skills, bow hunting skills, computer hacking skills... Girls only want boyfriends who have great skills.” – Napoleon

Saucy credits garnish high school foodstuff alongside screamingly mundane high school ephemera serving as cringe-worthy currency all the while inducing smile after smile. Aaron Ruell, who also plays Kipland "Kip" Ronald Dynamite, designed the opening credit sequence for Jared and Jerusha Hess' "Napoleon Dynamite" with the White Stripes' "We're Going to be Friends" easing in childlike qualities.

We had an opportunity to speak with Hess about the unique openings to his films. This week follows on from "Gentlemen Broncos," with a discussion on the genesis of the Napoleon title sequence.

Art of the Title: Tell us how this sequence came about.

Jared Hess: When we made Napoleon it was very low budget and we made the whole thing for under $400,000; when we screened the film at Sundance we did not have an opening title sequence at all - it opened cold. It went from a black screen right to Napoleon standing in front of his house waiting for the school bus, and we had a very basic credit roll at the end of the film.

When we sold the film to Fox Searchlight I remember they test screened the film a couple of different times and one of the silly questions that kept coming up in the focus groups afterwards (adopts voice of Brutus from Gentlemen Broncos) "What year does this take place? I mean it's like everybody's wearing clothes from the 80's and the 90's, yet they have the Internet, I'm really confused." So this question came up a few times and the Fox Searchlight marketing people were like "maybe we could do something to say that this is happening now" because I kept explaining to them that I grew up in a small town in Idaho and that things are more, you know, functional and fashion doesn't matter as much, so those things are very normal.

For whatever reason people didn't understand that rural way of life, so Fox said "why don't we do an opening title sequence." I wanted it to feel organic and match the film, so 8 months after the film had been completed and before the theatrical release, we shot the title sequence. It's kind of weird, but because they wanted to show that the film takes place now, there's a title where a hand pulls Napoleon's school ID out of a wallet and it says '2004' - that was like the big deal for Fox, hoping that would put to bed anyone’s question as to when it happened.

We filmed it in my cinematographer's basement. Aaron Ruell, the guy that plays Kip, is an amazing photographer and one of my closest friends so I spoke with him about the design. I really wanted to do a cool title sequence and after talking with him about a couple of ideas he just kind of ran with it and came up with the food and plates and tiles etc., and I knew a guy in my neighborhood who owned a carpet shop and we went and got all the backgrounds there. It was really low budge' man. It was shot just with a 35mm camera and a Kino Flo in the basement.

We actually had Jon Heder placing all the objects in and out [of frame], and then showed it to Searchlight who really liked it and thought it was great, but some lady over there was like "There are some hangnails, or something -the hands look kinda gross! It's really bothering me, can we re-shoot some of those? We'll send you guys a hand model." We were like "WHAT?!" This of course was my first interaction with a studio at all, so they flew out a hand model a couple weeks later, who had great hands, but was five or six shades darker than Jon Heder. So we reshot, but they're now intermixed, so if you look there are like three different dudes hands (our producer's are in there too.) It all worked our great though and was a lot of fun.

There is one title shot with a trapper keeper with the micro machines, and in grade school me and my buddies would hide stuff in there. Those were some of the initial ideas, to have the credits be these embedded objects that were a part of Napoleon's life.

ATS: Which is very similar to Bronco's titles in that setting.

JH: Absolutely. Both films geographically are very similar -we shot Napoleon up in Idaho and Broncos was shot in Utah- so a lot of the inner mountain west aesthetic is present. You can tell so much about your characters before you even see them onscreen through a title sequence and we knew that with Broncos we wanted to really begin to tell who this person was and what he was into by showing the pulpy sci-fi novels.

ATS: And what about Nacho?

JH: The titles are super over the top, but once we found that song "Religious Man," we knew it would be a great way to open the film. That came from the editing, where initially we had all this footage of the kid with a lot more dialog, but we ended up just cutting it down. We shot a few extra pieces like him building his cape, after the fact, just to massage it with the other shots we already had. I feel like so many titles sequences are ultimately a waste of time, so you might as well be using that time to help tell your story.

ATS: In researching Napoleon's opening we found that Aaron Ruell's inspired title design was misattributed to title design legend Pablo Ferro but that Ferro did work on the film. How did this opportunity come about?

JH: Pablo Ferro happened to be working at the title house that did our closing credits. Learning that he did the titles for "Dr. Strangelove" was really cool. Pablo designed the handwritten "Napoleon Dynamite" title that appears over Napoleon's desk during the current event scene [about three minutes into the film]. That was the only opening title we had when we screened at Sundance. When we went back and shot the stuff Ruell designed, some people incorrectly assumed it was Ferro.

ATS: So what's next?

JH: We have been busy working on a Napoleon Dynamite animated series right now that will be on FOX. We're finishing up the pilot, it has all the original people from the film doing the voices and we're writing all of it ourselves. We always felt that these characters warranted 'the further adventures.' I mean the movie, to be honest, is kind of a live action cartoon anyway so it's fitting to continue the adventures in a cartoon world.

“Cyclops there. Cyclops there. Cyclops there... Oh, my holy crap! Surveillance doe's. I hate those.” – Brutus

'Classic' science fiction illustrations repurposed as faux forgotten novels, exhibited on sentimental backgrounds, color each credit for the opening title sequence of Jared Hess' very funny "Gentlemen Broncos."

We had an opportunity to speak with Hess about his films, and their unique openings. Our interview continues next week with musings on his feature film debut, "Napoleon Dynamite."

Art of the Title: Tell us about your initial ideas for this sequence.

Jared Hess: We had the idea when we wrote the screenplay that we wanted the opening credits sequence to be a bunch of science fiction book covers where the credits were embedded in place of where the titles used to be, so while we were shooting the film my production designer Richard Wright and people on the production side were going through existing artwork to see what was available. The idea was to scan and tweak them and then print up new book covers and shoot them at the end of production.

We were first looking for stuff that looked right and helped set the tone but we quickly learned that it was going to be difficult to clear the rights, a lot were part of family estates. Luckily the artwork that I liked the most was from a guy named Kelly Freas and they were able to contact his wife -he's passed away- so most of the artwork in the title sequence is stuff he had drawn for different science fiction journals as well as books. What was weird was that a couple of the characters he'd drawn looked liked the people in our film, like Jemaine's book. The one we have for Sam Rockwell (a piece by David Lee Anderson) also bears a striking resemblance. It was kind of uncanny.

Original covers and artworks (Click to Enlarge)

ATS: So what's your approach to directing these sequences? How much planning are you doing? Are you storyboarding it?

JH: Once you get the paperwork back from legal knowing what the billing order is, you can then start to piece together what you're shooting. We looked at the book designs, and just tried to be smart [in choosing] the images, and what's coming before and after, just being conscious of making stuff work well when it's cut together. Off the cuff, we walked around one of our sets, knowing what the covers were, just looking for the right backgrounds to showcase some variety; these were just static shots. We were very free form and in the moment, and we spent a day shooting, just like the Napoleon [opening].

I mean for Broncos we had all the books printed up and then went and shot them in the kitchen and living set of the geodesic dome home that Benjamin and his mother live in. Literally we showed up at 7am and said "this book looks good here, let's shoot it right here" or it looks good against this background or couch and we would shoot multiple takes not knowing what would work the best when it was finally cut together, so we gave ourselves a little wiggle room. Towards the end it felt like we shot every good background, like were stretching a little bit in places.

Filming the title sequence (Click to Enlarge)

ATS: It also helps that the book covers look real.

JH: Richard did an awesome job, but part of it too is that you're looking at the books dead on. I wanted to be able to see the whole book so that you could recognize that it was a book. If we were tight on the name or where the credit was, it maybe wouldn't register as a book, and shooting it in 1.85:1 you then have a lot of dead space and you've got to figure out what to put there. He scanned these old books and then he and a graphic designer buddy of his (most of the time) put in completely different fonts and colors than what was was originally there. He spent a lot of time on it. He ran over a couple of them with his car and scraping them on the ground to try and make them looked 'lived in.'

The legal department at Fox -because of the different guilds- were really trying to push us to use the same font for everybody and we thought that was lame. We reassured them that everything would be the same size and take up the same amount of space on screen, but we had to use different fonts obviously. We did end up using the same font for the "Written By" and "Directed by" text because of worries from the legal department. It's weird dude.

Hess and I drew a lot of inspiration for the sci-fi aspects of the film from old paperback sci-fi book covers that we would file through in used book stores. Many obscure titles from the 60s-80s have amazingly creative art; some brilliant, some really dumb -but funny dumb. I started buying all my favorites to decorate the office and use as reference. I could usually buy a dozen for a couple bucks. I think that one day, while admiring some of the weirder covers, Hess decided that it would make a nice title sequence.

Artist Frank Kelly Freas (Click to Enlarge)

So over the course of filming, with the help of the producer's assistant David Dilley, I scoured bookstores and the internet to figure out who had painted our favorites which was not such an easy task. The majority of the art was not attributed to anyone and many of the publishers of the books were either out of business or had been gobbled up by larger mega-publishers over the years. The majority of the titles we managed to obtain for use are painted by the great illustrator Kelly Freas.

Book layouts by Peter Sattler (Click to Enlarge)

We wanted the books to look as authentic as possible, so we spent several weeks trying out different fonts and layouts. I was able to convince my friend, Peter Sattler, a very talented former graphic designer -who played a big part in the creation of this title sequence- to head up the layout of graphics, etc. Then we applied all the final book covers to actual books and aged them down to look the same as they do in those dusty Salt Lake City second hand book shops. Most of the art chosen for the covers either has some vague representation or relation to what the credited person's role was on-or-in the film or has a slight resemblance to the people themselves.

First production book (Click to Enlarge)

It seemed appropriate to film the books in Benjamin Purvis' house. It was a nice way to introduce the viewer to the bizarre contrast of Judith's pastel, crafty, wholesome home and the Ben's uncomfortably weird sci-fi imagination that was nurtured within it. And the music just drove the nail on the head. It's a catchy tune with a dated sound about the far out future. The lyrics are pretty amazing, "magic pills and judgement day"...I can imagine that Benjamin could have written them himself.

ATS: Have you ever had an idea for a title sequence but the technology isn't quite there yet eg., retro 3D?

JH: I really haven't...I guess I think a little more lo-fi than that. I think that most of the title work that interests me is stuff you have to photograph, and those have been the ones I've always enjoyed, like the opening sequence to "To Kill A Mockingbird."

ATS: There is a manifesto-like quality to your sequences where the emphasis is on humor; where does that come from?

JH: The three films I've done so far are comedies and to me it's important to let the audience know right away that things are going to be silly, and any way that can be done to convey that -taking advantage of setting the tone of the film in the title sequence- is important to me. As far as the comedy, some of the stuff we found for the book covers wasn't even really sci-fi related, especially the card I picked for myself that says "A Jared Hess Film" -it has an old dude in a pioneer bonnet sharpening a knife- that was the weirdest thing and Kelly Freas had all kinds of junk like that, and it kinda blew my mind.

On set photos 1 (Click to Enlarge)

ATS: How did you start out as a filmmaker?

JH: I come from a big Mormon family of six boys and was always making really lame karate movies on the trampoline with my brothers. Later on I actually started interning as a camera assistant with a cinematographer my mom had gone to high school with. So every summer from the time I was fourteen I would work as a camera assistant, like as a camera loader, on whatever he was working on, whether it was a commercial or documentaries or small feature films, so I had a little production experience before I went to college. At film school I thought I wanted to be a DP for a while so I actually shot a lot of student films. I really didn't like what I working on though and thought a lot were just a lame waste of film, so I decided that I needed to write my own comedies, and that's when I shot "Peluca" which is the short film that inspired Napoleon. It's on the DVD and you can see how poorly that's exposed, it's grainier than all get out. That was the foray into filmmaking.

For Nacho I'd been a big fan of the lucha libre masked hero wrestling films and after Napoleon we learned about a Mexican friar who was moonlighting as a wrestler to raise money for an orphanage. It was an article or property that Paramount had bought and we got to go write it with our friend Mike White, and luckily I was already a big fan of that world.

On set photos 2 (Click to Enlarge)

So much of Broncos is autobiographical. I mean the mother character is very similar to my mother, who made popcorn balls and would make me and my brothers go sell them and she also worked for a Modest nightgown company. My wife has a cousin who lives up in Alaska, he's 15, and for a long time he'd been writing really messed up science fiction stories that bring his mother to tears all the time. We read a couple of them and they were... I mean I could really relate to this kid in a weird way, and we just thought it would be a good jumping off point. The story of a misunderstood artist, trying to do stuff that he was passionate about.

ATS: How much of the way you work is self taught versus film school?

JH I've always wondered how real directors do it. Definitely self taught. My wife and I have co-written all of our films and I feel like in the writing process, that when a movie's been written it's already been directed once by somebody, and when we're writing characters and voices and things it's always been an important part of the process for us to know exactly what these people look like, what they wear and how they sound. I do a lot of line readings when I'm directing, doing all the voices of all the characters in our films, and I'm fortunate enough to work with people that don't completely hate me for that.

Final faux book covers with source details, 1-12 (Click to Enlarge)

Final faux book covers with source details, 13-24(Click to Enlarge)

ATS: Who or what inspires you?

JH: Immediate family. I really do take my cues from life and I guess I'm really mining people that I know, and therefore most of the characters that populate our films are loosely based on people that we know or people we grew up with. I've always wanted to see movies populated with these types of people, and so many people that I know have such fascinating or interesting stories, whatever quiet life they lead. I want this type of personality to be exposed to other people. Most filmmakers try to make the kind of movie they have wanted to see but haven't seen yet, so they're going out and making it. It can also be very selfish too, and you can end up alienating a ton of people as well.

ATS: Do you see yourself going more mainstream then?

JH: Yeah, I mean, there are plenty of stories that I want to do that I know I'd have to do in a studio way, to be able to do it bigger, and that stuff excites me. Napoleon and Bronco were smaller stories about smaller characters and needed to be done that way. I think it would be just as fun making something bigger, though Nacho was big for us. For me though, I want to make a western. I can't wait to make my western.

Jack White steadily builds with an upholsterers touch in prelude to the opening title sequence in Davis Guggenheim's "It Might Get Loud." It is a turning out of battered axes and the men who wield them, their names embossed or tracking in the grain with the promise of one last caress like some tough poetry.

leftchannel's opening title sequence for Reto Caduff's "The Visual Language of Herbert Matter," establishes the circulation of a documentary profiling the remarkable creative variance in design, photography and film of the titular AIGA Medalist bringing an almost forgotten genius back into focus. It is a remix of Matter's remarkable creative variance that smartly retains the clarity of each medium giving the uninitiated a budding sense of the artist unbound.

The works include Matter's iconic Swiss travel posters, pavilion designs for the New York World’s Fair 1939, photographs for Condé Nast publications, corporate image programs for Knoll furniture and the New Haven Railroad, designs for the Museum of Modern Art and the Guggenheim Museum, covers for the legendary Arts & Architecture Magazine and imagery from his lesser known work in film, the prime example being a film on the works of Alexander Calder.

The hypnotic magnificence of Duncan Jones' "Moon" is the setting of a kind of space-drawn samhain built to support the machines, here harvesters of Helium-3, the latest source of our terrestrial dependency.

Affecting documentary -all of it stock footage- is unveiled as something corporate and cankerous, shortly giving way to the inviting lightness of Clint Mansell's score. The title card features an impressive use of perspective. Placement and persistence of type domineers the narrative as something akin to Kevin Spacey's lilt which plays like HAL 9000 but follows its own heart.

The 2010 Emmy nominations for "Outstanding Main Title Design" have just been announced and feature an excellent selection of work from studios both large and small.

Imaginary Forces has three sequences in the running this year - "Human Target" (creative direction by Karin Fong), "Nurse Jackie" (Steve Fuller & Mark Gardner) and the recently featured "The Pacific" (Steve Fuller & Ahmet Ahmet).

From Shine, and creative director Michael Riley, comes the title sequence (as well as additional animation work) for HBO Film's "Temple Grandin" which also received an "Outstanding Lead Actress" nomination for Claire Danes.

Congratulations everyone.

The inspired plot-and-character impulses of Upasana Nattoji Roy’s title design for Director Indrajit Nattoji’s “Aagey Se Right” are a stamped and stitched lot of subjective fabulism in blinkingly bright rubbery Gothic impressions. We are jolted and whisked into a lickerish dervish where M.I.A., Nina Paley and/or Gogol Bordello could be your partners in menace.

Having an opportunity to harvest the marrow a bit more on the crafting of the opening to HBO’s “The Pacific,” Art of the Title was able to speak with both Steve Fuller formerly of Imaginary Force’s New York office and Ahmet Ahmet of Imaginary Force’s Los Angeles office to round out the creative history of the piece.

Baptismal and greasy war-streaked faces of mothers’ sons were rendered by Steve Fuller -then in his eighth year at Imaginary Forces, this his final project- and continued by Ahmet Ahmet, using charcoal on tracing paper then scanned and overlaid back into the provided original footage. Hans Zimmer’s score plays with a dignity that is on par with To Kill A Mockingbird (and it’s own legendary opening).

The visuals, profound; the sky-soiling blood sun, a singular helmet strap that seems to drain from the man, from his horrors, the variations of charcoal dust analogical to the volcanic sand of the Pacific islands -all blending and fueling the notion that life runs from our sons and the sons of our enemies then as now.

The opening sequence to Leo McCarey’s “Make Way for Tomorrow” reminds us to bridge generational “canyons” by honoring thy mother and thy father. Happy Mother’s Day!

MTV P.O.V

With powdery solder burns vignetting the schematics, Blac Ionica’s opening for MTV’s “P.O.V.” animates the engineering behind the build to a tight beat with an air of retro espionage that keeps the pace.

Featuring the second best use of classic Metallica (the first being Joe Berlinger and Bruce Sinofsky’s “Paradise Lost: The Child Murders at Robin Hood Hills“) the title sequence to “Zombieland” does not back down. Flashes of jarring death slathered with slow speed splatter document a kinetic finality that does not force its humor. We see every black bauble of biohazardous blood upsurge and dot the landscape of a crippled Earth.