Our first video assignment is a series of six shots that combine emotional and visual elements with basic video techniques. We filmed and edited the following video:
http://www.vimeo.com/10563530
Title Sequence Review: Catch Me If You Can Tuesday, Mar 16 2010
Design 9:57 pm
The following title sequence is taken from the beginning of Steven Spielberg’s film Catch Me If You Can. Created by Olivier Kuntzel and Florence Deygas, this motion graphics example incorporates the film’s themes well and catches the audience’s attention immediately with its unique and creative style.
The movie Catch Me If You Can is about a con artist who poses as a pilot, a pediatrician, an attorney, and numerous other professions all the while cashing fraudulent checks in a plethora of countries. The con artist is tailed by an FBI agent throughout a significant part of the film.
This title sequence immediately sets the tone of the movie. The music is mysterious, and so is the man who appears in the left-hand side of the screen. Throughout the sequence the man— or the con artist as we later recognize him to be—is moving with each screen change. Most of the time he is moving as if he is being chased or hiding and sneaking to the next screen. Sometimes, though, he appears calm. This is because he is impersonating someone else and has little to fear because of his disguise. For example, the sequence establishes the pilot impersonation early on, creating a terminal at an airport with a man reading a newspaper and transitioning from screen to screen with white airplanes. The black boxes with yellow arrows also indicate a public area – an airport. What is interesting about these arrows is that they seem to point to the con artist, as if surreptitiously giving away his identity. When the title of the film appears, it takes up the whole screen. The “me” in the title is white and disappears before the other letters, again indicating the mysterious nature of the film and the con artist. Even the way the “me” disappears is related to the movie’s plot since an airplane drags it off.
The color progression throughout the sequence is also intriguing. The sequence starts out with a bold blue and then eventually shifts to a bold yellow and red. The shift from cold colors to warm colors suggests the urgency in the con artist’s chase. Near the end of the sequence the colors fade to a light pink and then finally to a white before returning to a similar blue to the beginning. The fading and return help signal to the audience that the sequence is nearing its end and thus help transition into the film.
Besides the parallels to the plot, this title sequence is effective because of the repetition of lines. Whether they serve as elevators, ladders, or just lines with words dangling from them, the lines are something that is consistent throughout this sequence. They could easily get boring, but Kuntzel and Deygas’ decision to keep the screens moving with the lines (so that the lines exhibit successful motion graphics by leading the viewers eye from one image or text to the next), and switching the direction, the color, and speed at which the lines appear and disappear keep the audience on edge, almost as if they, too are trying to escape from an FBI agent.
The only thing that could potentially be altered would be the length of the sequence. Though interesting, the sequence does run on the long side and for viewers eager to enter the actual movie, the intrigue of the sequence seems to wear off before it has quite reached its end.
Can You Read This? Wednesday, Mar 3 2010
Design 4:36 am
For my project, I decided to design a poster advocating for women’s literacy in Afghanistan. This is an important cause to me, and it is one that I feel is often overlooked. A lot of people donate money or build schools in countries like Afghanistan without really fully understanding the situation there. The money goes to the country and then the person pats themselves on the back for a job well done. In my poster, I wanted to force the viewer to think at a different level. I wanted them to really comprehend the cause. By creating text that doesn’t appear readable at first and emphasizing a door that leads to darkness, I hoped to make the viewer experience a degree of “illiteracy” or at least understand what that initial confusion must be like. I chose to make the poster mostly black and white because I felt like that best represented my message. If I added color, the simplicity of the image would be overpowered by the color and the strength of the message would be lost. At the same time, I didn’t want to alienate my viewer too much and so I decided to make the text at the top readable to a certain extent (I chose a more Arabic looking font more because it matched the design of the doors better than other fonts not because I wanted to make a political or religious statement of any sort) and to enhance the sunlight reflecting on the doors from my original photograph. I thought this would be a unique and (hopefully) effective way of raising awareness about the the need for women’s literacy in Afghanistan.
Poster Analysis: Lost in Translation Wednesday, Mar 3 2010
Design 12:15 am
This poster of the 2003 film Lost in Translation is simple yet effective. It catches the attention of its viewer and delivers its message without giving in to the common temptation of overcrowdedness that so many of today’s movie posters tend to do. The title itself automatically gives the viewer a sense of the film’s story and message—that of a newlywed uncertain of her future residing in place foreign to most of what she has known all her life—but it is ultimately the design of the poster that hones in on Scarlett Johansson’s character’s alienation.
The effectiveness of this poster is due in part to the composition of the complete image (including the text) and the way in which it successfully ties together multiple images into one strong construct. The image of the lost and lonely girl holding the umbrella is clearly a separate photograph from the busy image of Tokyo’s heavily lighted and advertised buildings, and yet the way in which both are arranged and blended together suggest otherwise. As viewers, we know the images are separate, and yet the transparency of the umbrella and the softness of the girl’s face make us group the two images into one. There is also a sense of harmony and visual echo in the image as a whole because the blues and yellows of the city’s buildings are carried over to the girl’s umbrella. This helps reinforce the connection between the images. Even though the tone of the colors attached to the girl are more somber than those of the buildings, the two images still have those colors in common, making the viewer able to, perhaps subconsciously, group the two parts together. If the colors of the two images starkly contrasted then we would probably be less inclined to group them in the same way or even to group them at all. In fact, even the reddish-brown of Scarlett’s jacket and hair indicate a sense of visual echo and flow because of the way in which they effortlessly blend into the street beneath her.
Another strong element of this poster is the alignment of the components within the image. Composition-wise the image is successful because the horizontals of the street and the verticals of the buildings intersect near the tip of the girl’s umbrella, creating a sense of balance and unity within the image. The decision to have the girl in front of the city scene (and therefore larger) is also significant. Even though the perspective of the city is intriguing, we know the focus is on the girl and that the movie is about the girl more than about the city because of her proximity to us. Her size and positioning thus emphasize her dominance in the canvas and in the movie as a whole.
Thematically, we also get a sense of the protagonist’s loneliness and disorientation from the subtle contrasts within the poster. For instance, her umbrella seems to fade away with the rain, indicating perhaps that she doesn’t belong where she is presently and is not a permanent part of the city, but instead a foreigner, a kind of temporary resident. The decision to make her facing the opposite direction of the buildings and the dinosaur also reinforce her isolation and separation from Tokyo and from life in general. While the busy life of Tokyo carries on behind her, Scarlett stares off into the distance at something we can’t see. That sense of mystery creates intrigue, while at the same time reinforces one of the main themes of the film: alienation. Combined, these elements of design make us as viewers not only able to understand the film’s tagline: “Everyone wants to be found,” but it also allows us to empathize with Scarlett’s character and begin to experience the mood and emotions of the film for ourselves.
