SXSW Film Design Awards "Excellence in Title Design"
For the second year in a row Art of the Title served on the jury for SXSW's Excellence in Title Design competition, allowing us to share the stage with a terrific group of designers and producers.
Design Awards organizer David Horridge brought together Jenny Lee (Smith & Lee Title Design), Kurt Volk (Troublemaker Studios), Ron Pippin (Shiny Object), and Tommy Pallotta (Submarine Channel) for an evening of show and tell on March 14th at the Vimeo theater.
The evening event started with our previously mentioned "A Brief History of Title Design" video, led in to IFC's Matt Singer and Stephen Saito discussing five sequences from their recent "The 50 Greatest Opening Title Sequences of All Time" article - Vertigo, Fahrenheit 451, Saturday Night Fever, The Naked Gun and Watchmen - and then finished off with a viewing of the 17 nominations for the year, listed below.
After the screening we retired next door to the Hilton bar where we fairly quickly came to an agreement on the jury choice for this year. On an unrelated note our gathering was also interrupted numerous times by local talk radio host Alex Jones (he "happened by" to visit Tommy) and ended with Kurt leaving for the Highball bowling alley to do karaoke with Jon Hamm (aka Don Draper of Mad Men.)
The following evening it was then Kurt's pleasure to present Blue Valentine with the 2011 Jury Award, and more remarkably the popular-vote Audience Award, for Best Title Sequence. The film's editor and title designer Jim Helton wasn't able to attend unfortunately but we messaged him during the event and he was thrilled to learn of the win.
Films
A huge part of the festival are the films, both large and small. A brief rundown of our favorites:
- Super - dark and awkwardly hilarious. Amazing animated titles, soon to be featured here.
- Being Elmo - is it possible to be MORE emotional when watching a film? Heartfelt and completely honest.
- Attack the Block - Assault on Precinct 13 meets Gremlins. Throw in the greatest practical monster effects since An American Werewolf in London and the best amalgamated editing and soundtrack since Fight Club and we're talking an amazing feature debut from writer/director Joe Cornish.
- Hobo with a Shotgun - the title pretty much sums it up. Another terrific genre piece.
As with last year we was able to attend some great panels, some great short films, meet some great people and eat a lot of great food. We can't wait to return.
- Ian Albinson, Editor-in-chief
"You're gonna need a bigger boat." - Chief Martin Brody
My role has always been "point person" for Art of the Title, and having managed the site on a daily basis since its inception in December 2007 my title has now changed to more clearly reflect the work I do.
Going forward I am now "Editor-in-chief | Founder" of the site, while Alex's role has adapted to become "Head Writer." These changes nicely coincide with some new additions to our team.
Joining us as "Contributing Authors" are the very talented Angel Tagudin, Lola Landekic and Will Perkins. I am absolutely thrilled to have them onboard and the work they have done so far has been of outstanding quality. I thank you all.
- Ian Albinson, Editor-in-chief
Here’s a short film we put together for the opening of the SXSW “Title Design Finalists Screening” – an event that happens tonight in Austin, TX at the Vimeo theater in the convention center.
Very much looking forward to seeing our fellow jurors Jenny Lee (formally of Shadowplay Studios,) Kurt Volk (Troublemaker Studios,) Ron Pippin (Shiny Object,) and Tommy Pallotta (representing for Watch the Titles.)
- Ian Albinson, Editor-in-chief
This is the last bit of dialogue before the opening titles to Robert Rodriguez’s throwback exploitation flick Machete and a fitting MO for the unconventional mavericks at Troublemaker Studios. The sequence starts with a flamethrower devouring a Mexican hideout as the roiling smoke and flame quickly degrades into gritty lobby cards corrupted by dust and scratches.
Machete’s title sequence is a colorful parade of sneering villains, vixens, and an arsenal of menacing guns and knives. While the sequence sets the stage for a gory, over-the-top revenge romp, it also succeeds in grounding the entire film in another time and place. As the grainy titles scrape along at 1½ feet per second, the audience is transported back from their reclined seats at present day cineplexes to the nostalgic era of drive-ins and drafthouses.
In this week’s feature, Kurt Volk (Art Director at Troublemaker Studios) talks with Art of the Title about Guacamole guns, the influence of Coke commercials, and the benefits of working under the same roof as producer/director Robert Rodriguez.
"Tell me how I should be. Just tell me. I'll do it." - Dean
Jim Helton and Charles Christopher Rubino's end credits for Derek Cianfrance's Blue Valentine is a last look of what was and what will not be.
In a managed duality of the intimate and the expansive, a hypnotic racked bokeh of celestial colors spreads across the night sky with Grizzly Bear's "Alligator" conducting the atmospherics, elevating the experience of the film to something glorious.
The title sequence taken with the trailer (below for your viewing pleasure) reminds us of this following scene from one of the greatest films of all time, "A Thousand Clowns."
"Never say you know the last word about any human heart." - Henry James
Huge Designs' opening title sequence for the UK's Channel 4 television adaptation of William Boyd's novel Any Human Heart casts widening threads of light and shadow to frame an Everyman's journey through infinite sadness and celebrity.
"It's time to get out." - James Bond
What stifles creativity? Tedious third party rudeness, fear of appearing the fool, fear of failure (stigmatizing mistakes), fear of authority, fear of bucking the team or the trend?
MK12, the title and motion graphic designers for director Marc Forster's 2008 entry in the James Bond franchise, Quantum of Solace, englobes 007 with women in the dunes and the persistence of arid visions; a zoetrope in free fall and sandy contrails of a bullet on its way. Taking the title design reins from names like Binder, Brownjohn, and Kleinman, MK12 – billing itself as a "full-service lateral hyperthreaded tactical design and research bureau" – seems to have attained a self-fulfilling creative kinship that flies in the face of what author Bruce Sterling describes as the flux of "Hollywood film ad-hocracies."
To make a movie, Sterling says:
You're pitchforking a bunch of freelancers together, exposing some film, using the movie as the billboard to sell the ancillary rights, and after the thing gets slotted to video, everybody just vanishes.
To take the idea further, Joel Kotkin, author of a landmark 1995 article in Inc. magazine entitled, "Why Every Business Will Be Like Show Business," writes:
Hollywood has mutated from an industry of classic huge, vertically integrated corporations into the world's best example of a network economy. Eventually, every knowledge-intensive industry will end up in the same flattened, atomized state. Hollywood just has gotten there first.
Ben Radatz, MK12 creative director is part of something different:
The studio as an entity is definitely greater than the sum of its parts. It's casual, because everyone is unpretentious, anti-hierarchical and open-minded. Yet it's also personal, because I believe most of us are introverts. And more importantly, we are all friends first.
So MK12 is a collective that capitalizes on true collaborative creativity realized (or not) by and with the hands of friends. Why is this alternative not the well-practiced norm from the damn beginning? What progressive, Vandermeerish planes of warped Gothicism would we be exploring? Even as we take solace in the knowledge that we will have a crack at it in this lifetime, the underbelly's nibblet tugs are ever-feeding with the awareness that we might've been there sooner.
