"I sent my soul through the invisible, some letter of that afterlife to spell: and by and by my soul returned to me and answered, ‘I myself am Heaven and Hell.’" - Omar Khayyám (from the Rubaiyat of Omar Khayyám)

A spectral camera soars languidly through a deep valley, conjuring up images of the American frontier: towering mountains, evergreen trees, and serene water lucidly captured through a wide-angle lens. Sweeping across the landscape, the camera begins to follow a tiny yellow VW Beetle making its way up a winding road carved into the steep mountain cliffs. The lens frequently relegates the car to only a fraction of the frame, revealing how minuscule the vehicle is against the grandeur on which it is trespassing. This bird’s eye chase foreshadows the events that await the Torrence family and the film’s harrowing themes of isolation and madness.

After being offered The Exorcist and its sequel, Exorcist 2: The Heretic, the iconoclast filmmaker, Stanley Kubrick, declined both and opted instead to adapt a story from Stephen King’s novel, The Shining. The title sequence introduces viewers to Kubrick’s unorthodox vision of horror, as haunting landscapes and unnerving score combine to cause an ineffable unease. By discarding genre tropes such as creaking doors, spiderwebs, dark corridors, and excessive blood, the title sequence outperforms convention.

The stunning mountain ranges were filmed by Greg McGillivray (from MacGillivray Freeman Films), a cameraman personally chosen by Kubrick.

From the book Kubrick by Michel Ciment:

The aerial shots share many characteristics with the hotel footage filmed using the Steadicam, a stabilizing camera mount pioneered by Garrett Brown. Kubrick’s innovative use of the Steadicam on The Shining was considered groundbreaking, and the seemingly effortless gliding motions and long takes afforded by the system closely echo the title sequence. This hitherto untested stylistic choice imbues every move of the camera with a sense of tension and dread. Unaware of what lies around the next curve in the road or hallway corridor, viewers are lured deeper and deeper into the world of the film.

Unusually, the title sequence for The Shining also employs rolling credits, a design element normally reserved for end credits. When paired with the unsettling musical score, the austere Helvetica typeface — cryptically colored a hot blue — seems immediately at odds with the pristine wilderness.

Dies Irae (Latin for Day of Wrath) is the name of the 13th century Gregorian chant re-envisioned by composers Wendy Carlos and Rachel Elkind for the title sequence. Their modern take establishes the haunting atmosphere using the sounds of an electronic synthesizer — a common trope in many subsequent horror films. The synth fades in and out periodically, allowing a Native American ritual hymn to enter. The shrill wail of sirens pierce the vast sky and add to the uncanny mood.

Like many of cinema’s most notable title sequences, the introduction to The Shining touches on themes later addressed in the film. For a celebrated and chronicled filmmaker such as Kubrick — known for his trenchant observations and perfectionism — myriad readings can be taken from viewing this opening. Jack Torrence’s ascent into the celestial Rocky Mountains is also a descent into the depths of his own personal hell; the lonely and strangely claustrophobic mountain road is the first of many labyrinthine constructs the film forces the Torrence family into. Here Kubrick introduces the viewer to an uncharacteristic form of horror: the domestic kind. When stripped of its supernatural elements, The Shining is an all too familiar tale of abuse, alienation, and paranoia.

WRITER: Shaun Mir
© Art of the Title, 2011

"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.

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.

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.

Two fine fire melt title reveals open Howard Hawks’/Christian Nyby’s “The Thing from Another World” and John Carpenter’s immutable and Hitchcockian “The Thing,” respectively. In speaking with Krystian Morgan, a 21-year-old from Wales we relearned a thing or two about work ethic, humility and the importance of fresh eyes. Morgan’s title sequence, based on Carpenter’s vision, was created when Morgan was in his final year in university where he studied motion graphics and compositing. His grave atmospherics veer into different territory, away from the effective simplicity of the originals with mutations rising to the fore, all the while echoing 90′s Romanek/Reznor and involuntary quivers of the Brothers Quay.

Model kits and kilts.

ISO Design’s opening title sequence to “A History of Scotland” offers a gathering sense of self and of a scaled Scotland. Using a tilt-shift effect that simulates miniature scale model photography where a shallow depth of field is created by blurring areas of the composition either optically or in post, the title technique nicely captures the spirit of the pioneering Picts.

For our first post in 2010 we revisit the “How We Built Britain” titles with an interview with their creator Gareth Edwards. This was requested by some readers, facilitated by others and now available to all and feels like the perfect way to begin this new decade. Edwards, a truly multi-talented designer/visual effects artist/director has worked for the BBC on numerous productions including “Seven Wonders of the Industrial World” and “Attila the Hun,” this year completes his first feature film, “Monsters.”

A tangle of utility in both architecture and typography offers a fascinatingly structured title sequence for the BBC’s “How We Built Britain” that bespeaks an acquisitive England. The artificial monuments of type seem proportionally sound, the final title card an achievement of engineering.