"When the past no longer illuminates the future, the spirit walks in darkness." —Alexis de Tocqueville
Adam Jensen is dying. The blinding lights of an operating theater melt away in a mechanical fever dream of pleading voices, surgical tools, and rent flesh. Memories of lost love flash between images of a broken and dissected form, while shattered limbs and failing organs – the embodiment of Jensen’s flawed humanity – are replaced with the cold perfection of carbon fiber and silicon. A body restored, a soul fractured – but what remains of the man? A corporate thrall bound to unseen masters or a transcendent being gifted with the power to change everything?
Echoing the central motif of Eidos-Montreal’s video game – the merging of the real and artificial – Goldtooth Creative’s stunning title sequence for Deus Ex: Human Revolution seamlessly blends both live-action and computer-generated imagery to introduce players to a world at the dawn of a cybernetic renaissance.
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"Not every conspiracy is a theory."
An unseen agent trails the truth, circling mysteries and raising questions with every paranoid swipe of the highlighter. Newspapers, bar codes, maps, documents, and photos – otherwise mundane minutiae is checked and rechecked for evidence, a pattern of some kind, or perhaps nothing at all. Every whir and click of the microfilm reader widens the web, as the line between conspiracy theorist and intelligence analyst is blurred in Imaginary Forces’ title sequence for AMC’s Rubicon.
"Why someone weak? Because a weak man knows the value of strength, the value of power... "
- Abraham Erskine
As James Montgomery Flagg’s iconic Uncle Sam orders viewers to join him on a final tour of American war propaganda, the line between two- and three-dimensional art is blurred. Painted images of smiling pin-up girls, parachutes, and fighter planes warp and shift, invigorated with a depth beyond their original form. Even ol’ Rosie the Riveter makes an appearance among the flags and artillery as the closing credits for Captain America: The First Avenger roll out.
"I wonder all the time why no-one's never just stood up and become a real superhero." - Libby
Pop comic colors straight from the idle margins of a high school student's sketchbook splash high contrast iconography from James Gunn's Super across the screen, providing a startling impact in comparison to the film's themes – winding the viewer up before sinking them into the mundane and sometimes pathetic life of Frank D'Arbo.
Art of the Title speaks with PUNY, the design group behind the whimsy.
"Only Sanity Can Keep You Alive."
In clever shadow play, the title type is the very thing you pass in the darkness that makes your blood run cold. With an issuance of fractal lobotomies and mirrored banishments worthy of Zod, the opening titles to John Carpenter's The Ward begin with woodcut prints from the middle ages depicting men and women racked to the tools of torture. Glass shards fly in the final moments before death sentences are carried out, and we are shown the early days of mental science in which similar and yet more evil devices were used to "cure” the insane.
The designers, known for their work on Up in the Air and Juno, exacerbate the already robust sense of dread that exists regarding the sensed helplessness that has become synonymous with the mental profession in the viewers' collective minds.
Sex. Power. Murder. Amen.
In The Borgias lush opening sequence, pious palms grip rosaries as beads of ichor seep through canvas bedaubed, inking avarice and lusty limbs groaning. Bon Boullogne's Triumph of Neptune, Caravaggio's Death of the Virgin, Agnolo Bronzino's Exposure of Luxury: these moldering Renaissance and Baroque masterpieces murmur heavy the echo of desire. And when stillness overcomes the wild flow of exquisite stains, there gapes a single eye, staring back.
"Sometimes I'll be working on a piece, and I'll think, "No, this is bullshit." So I will literally rub bull excrement on the piece as a metaphor." - Kieran Draper
The wooden case is opened and inside, an array of tiny accoutrements. From it a tiny hat is removed while the credits sidle in, superimposed. And as a mouse figurine has her hair dyed vermilion, Paul McCartney's melancholic voice shepherds us through the opening titles for the delightfully downcast 2010 screwball comedy, Dinner for Schmucks.
The song, "The Fool on the Hill," kicks off a journey through a series of close-ups of itty-bitty objects being selected, constructed, and assembled. The minutiae gives way to several astonishing tableau vivants of miniatures—a bespectacled mouse and his redheaded mousette—engaging in the sweetest of romantic clichés, demonstrating an artistry so fine it leans toward obsession. The cherry on top is the whimsical and varied custom typography: the letters slink in and out of sight, vulnerable and idiosyncratic, wavering between wide and narrow, further lending the titles a sense of clumsy sensitivity.
“We wanted to create a naive type face that would feel done by Steve's character's hand without it being too precious or quirky. Likewise the animation had to tread lightly on the picture so as to support and not distract from the action on screen.”
