“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.

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.

Keeping a sense of scale at arm’s length.

Shadowplay Studios’ opening title sequence for director Jason Reitman’s “Up in the Air” intoxicates us with neatly happenstance compositions of a casual topology from a commuter’s perspective with music by Sharon Jones and the Dap Kings that savors common ground. Just below the stratosphere there is our gaze and our patterns. We’re big, we’re small.

A fun step through espionage nostalgia, a ball becomes a blip becomes a bullet becomes a drip connecting the brightly colored character facets in the opening to Adam Reed’s very funny “Archer.”

Art Director Neal Holman details the creation of the title sequence for us.

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.

Watery cobblestone logos and longitudinal linotype layer, lace and lash Prologue Films’ opening and end credit work for Guy Ritchie’s “Sherlock Holmes.”

The sequence creative director Danny Yount, a self-taught Emmy-winning designer/director produced main titles for Six Feet Under and The Grid while at Digital Kitchen. He currently resides at Prologue Films and has created titles for Kiss Kiss Bang Bang, Iron Man and RockNRolla.

With this Strange Days post, 10 years on and to the minute, we begin closing the curtains on our Single Take Titles series. If one of your favorites wasn’t featured, please let us know what we missed.

In the comments readers have mentioned Goodfellas and Russian Ark. For the purposes of this series the latter film qualifies as its opening is uncut, though its actual titles fall on black before the shot begins. However, this beginning is quickly overshadowed by the incredible achievement of the entire film being shot as a single 96-minute Steadicam take.

There is something about the power of single take shots, Steadicam or otherwise, wherever they fall in a movie’s timeline. In fact, we do intend to feature the single take scene that inspired this feature and it is not an opening sequence (but it is connected with one Martin Scorsese).

Read the rest of this entry »

With brassy nationalism and radioactive gaga the opening to director Sam Liu’s Superman/Batman: Public Enemies offers powerful equanimity of oppressed superpowers in this thinly veiled allegory of the republic for which it stands.

Erin Sarofsky, Founder and Creative Director of Sarofsky Corp.:

“We created the feature main title for the new animated movie “Superman/Batman: Public Enemies” for Warner Video and DC Animation that tips the hat to Saul Bass. The project is a 2:17 long animated piece that captures the spirit of classic 1960’s film titles. Bold and slightly abstract, the animated twists and turns are geometric references to the power of comic heroes as pop culture icons and a playful lead-in for the graphic novel-style drama to unfold.”

“Be careful what you wish for.”

With a descending doll all expectation is set aside at the start of author Neil Gaiman and director Henry Selick’s Coraline. Her punch-and-cut deconstruction is distressing; at her inversion you may feel a gastric tug. You may also dream of submissive needlepoint only to awake with new eyes.

To paraphrase the film’s series of alphabet posters, “‘C’ is for Coraline – brave little girl. Who unlocks the door to a whole different world.”