As a design nerd, some of the best parts of watching a movie, for me, happen before the plot even starts. The opening titles are often treated as a formality, three minutes to be sat through on the way to the story. But every so often a director hands that job to someone who treats it as its own art form, and the result is a short film inside the film — a distilled piece of visual storytelling that sets the entire tone before a single line of dialogue lands. Here’s a brief, admittedly biased tour through a handful of the ones that still hold up.
Take Gattaca’s titles above: no logos, no fanfare, just a hushed blue landscape with the film’s own name dissolving into what looks like frost, or skin, or magnified cellular tissue — appropriate for a film about genetic determinism, where identity itself is written in invisible code. It’s a masterclass in restraint, saying everything about the movie’s obsession with purity and imperfection before a single actor appears onscreen. I was glad to discover a whole ecosystem of sites devoted purely to this discipline. Watch the Titles in particular treats design-forward title sequences with the same seriousness a film critic brings to the movie itself, cataloguing the typography, the choreography, the whole sequence frame by frame.
Some excellent creepiness going on in the intro to Stanley Kubrick’s ‘The Shining’ — that queasy helicopter shot trailing a tiny yellow car up a mountain road, scored to a warped, droning arrangement of the Dies Irae, announcing that something is deeply wrong long before anyone checks into the Overlook Hotel.
The intro credits to David Fincher’s breakout film Se7en are seen as more influential than maybe any other title sequence made since. Shot in grainy, hand-processed film and cut to a discordant Nine Inch Nails remix, it drops you straight into the scrawled, obsessive journals of a serial killer years before you meet him.
Via Watch the Titles
Main title designer Kyle Cooper has been credited as the man who single-handedly revitalized the main title sequence as an art form. His groundbreaking title sequence for Se7en (1995) changed the way we look and think about title design today and is arguably the most imitated main title ever made. The Se7en title sequence was hailed by New York Times Magazine as “One of the most important design innovations of the 1990s.”
“It seemed to me that when Saul Bass did The Man with the Golden Arm everybody said ‘Wow! Main titles can be more than just this utilitarian thing that we have to get out of the way.’ Somebody does something and it reminds people of what the potentialities are in a particular field. That’s what people have said to me about Se7en — they saw it and it made them want to be a title designer. A lot of that was about timing. Main title sequences were behind of what was happening in print in terms of typography and music videos and commercials. They felt a little bit dated. In the last fifteen years, myself and the designers that I’ve worked with have tried to be in touch with what else was happening creatively and to do main titles that were raising the bar.”
It’s worth pausing on the reference Cooper reaches for, because it’s the reference everyone in this field eventually reaches for. Saul Bass’s titles for The Man with the Golden Arm in 1955 — jagged white paper cutout shapes assembling themselves into a broken, angular arm against black, cut to Elmer Bernstein’s jazz score — are widely considered the moment film title design became a legitimate art form rather than a contractual afterthought. Bass proved a title sequence could set a film’s entire emotional register in under two minutes, and the entire discipline Cooper works in, and that this post is really about, exists in the wake of that one sequence.
If Se7en’s titles are all dread and grain, Juno’s are the tonal opposite — and just as considered. Designers Gareth Smith and Jenny Lee, working out of their own apartment, photographed Ellen Page walking through Vancouver at eight frames a second, then printed each frame, hand-outlined it, ran it through a photocopier twice to rough up the line work, hand-colored it in pencil, and physically cut it out with scissors before scanning it back in — six analog steps per frame, for a two-minute sequence, done at “cutting parties” with friends because the volume of paper got out of hand. Nothing about that jittery, homemade, slightly wobbly line quality was an accident; it’s exactly why the sequence feels like a shy teenager’s doodle brought to life, and exactly why it primed audiences for the film’s whole voice before Ellen Page said a word.
And here the Saul Bass lineage comes full circle: French design duo Kuntzel + Deygas built the titles for Steven Spielberg’s Catch Me If You Can (2002) as a direct, loving tribute to Bass’s flat, silhouetted mid-century style, animating Leonardo DiCaprio’s con artist as a slippery cartoon figure gliding through airports one step ahead of Tom Hanks’s detective. It’s a knowing period piece within a period piece — a 2002 studio film reaching back nearly fifty years to borrow the visual language of Bass’s golden age, and proving that language still has plenty of life in it. Which might be the real thread connecting every sequence here, from Gattaca’s dissolving frost to Se7en’s scratched-out journal to Juno’s scissor-cut paper doll: the best title designers treat those first ninety seconds not as a formality to survive but as their one guaranteed shot at an audience’s full, undivided attention — and they make it count.
Edited by Ben VanderVeen · About Moss & Fog
