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.