Saul Bass was a graphic designed and film maker mainly known for his film posters and title sequences as well as working for Alfred Hitchcock and Otto Preminger. He gained fame in 1955 by creating the title sequence for "A man with the golden arm" (Poster seen on right). He was well recognized by his use of Kinetic Typography in his title sequences, a name given to a technique which uses "moving text", animation of words or sentences to get through a message. (An example is seen below on the right.)
Similarly to him I could use Kinetic Typography in my Title Sequence to either tell a story in the background or to use to present credits. My main idea is to use Kinetic Typography whenever Bond shoots someone. Instead of a bullet text will appear with someone's name or the films title, then once it hits the victim, the letters will turn red like blood and shatter all over the place, bouncing off the other actor. I could also have the Kinetic Typography on the sides while the action is happening, simply fading in and out of the scene at any moment with fluid movements.
As you can see below I have included two of his most successful works. "The man with the golden arm" caught my attention because of how well it fits with the music and theme it has to work with. For those times the Kinetic Typography was quite advanced and impressive also, going along with other special features. The second movie clip I included was the opening sequence to "Vertigo", again, where he worked with Hitchcock. This sequence caught my eye because of it's effects and again, surprisingly very fitting theme and music. It was very adaptable.
Saul Bass
Research+Ideas
James Bond Title Sequence
Below are three examples of real James Bond's title sequences that I plan to take inspiration from. hey range from he oldest, Dr.No to one of the newest, Skyfall. The one that caught my eye the most was Casino Royale, since it used silhouettes and a lot of shots from below, playing with perspective in a unique way. It uses a minimalist amount of colours and colour palette. Similarly to this video I have decided to use colour palettes in my final James Bond Title Sequence as well as to take video footage of action sequences then rotoscope over them to make the characters into interesting and simplistic yet recognizable silhouettes.
James Bond opening sequences are well known for their gun barrel scenes that often take up the first scene. The scene shows the viewers look through the gun barrel as James Bond comes onto the scene, has an action scene and then shoots into the gun barrel, after which a flowing down blood effect appears and covers the audience's vision of the scene. I really like this idea and would like to take my spin on it in my title sequence. My idea is to have the entire opening sequence done from the point of view of a sniper, where the scene doesn't end when he is shot but rather when he shoots at James Bond.
James Bond movies also use projection to show different things on people's bodies or the other way round. It is an interesting technique that can show us, the viewers, what is on the character's mind or what their role will represent in the film. I plan to use this idea however instead of projecting it on people's bodies I plan to use the silhouettes. Each time a character would be introduced or died, what they wish for the most will be projected on their silhouettes instead of the plain black ink. I hope this will add depth to my sequence as people will be able to possibly relate to the characters even though they've only just seen them appear on the screen.
James Bond
I chose three possible soundtracks for my final idea. It was very hard to narrow down all songs down to only a couple options since so many fit the part. James Bond is known for using popular soundtracks that fit it's theme in the opening sequence, hence why I chose the three songs that I thought it'd be quite easy to direct to and to which action sequences could take place. They had to be quite upbeat and either popular or fitting my theme of "Desires" since I named my project "House of Desires".
In the end I chose the last soundtrack, which is known my most people from the popular game franchise; Metal Gear Solid. Snake Eater by Cynthia Harrell was composed exclusively for the 3rd game of the franchise.The songs from the past James Bond opening sequences were often times vocalized by female singers with similar voices to Cynthia. The calming yet trendy music that is reminiscent of jazz and has many ups in tune can be input action scenes as well as many other moments that I could plan into my story board. The only problem I have found with this song was its name "Snake Eater". It is said in the song so many times that watchers could confuse the title for the name of the song. Nevertheless, I consider this a perfect pick for the James Bond title sequence that I will be making.
Possible Soundtrack
I have chosen very specific images for my Moodboard since they'd help me get a better understanding and grasp of what I was doing with my opening sequence. Each image represents what I will incorporate in my final version of this unit, or at least what I am planning to achieve. Moodboards are often used by any sort of artistic profession to establish the basics, time saving and help you work out what resources you will need to achieve your goal (They are occasionally also called inspiration boards).
As you can probably tell from my story board, the images represent what the themes in my James Bond title sequence will be. The first three images show that I want my work to be mostly in black and white, the first image showing people walking and their shadows; showcasing that I'm not only aiming to make silhouettes instead of showing coloured footage. It can also have many representative meanings such as the shadows following after people are their desires. The second image is more obvious, since it just shows I wish to have the view be from a snipers perspective. The third image shows I wish to use an alley of buildings or at least a singular (If time doesn't allow me to make more) where the view will switch in between the windows.
As seen on the images lower, they're in colour. I was planning to have the backgrounds be either inspired by aboriginal art or possibly back and white images, however at first I was afraid that they might make the silhouettes invisible so I instead chose the aboriginal art (this might change if I find suitable black and white backgrounds). As seen by the middle image I also took inspirations from cassino royale with the silhouettes. And finally where my final idea comes in; showing people's desires through their silhouettes and the reason why I named the short unit 'House of Desires'.
MoodBoard
I wanted to choose a colour palette that I found online to limit the colour use I will have during my opening sequence. Similarly to James Bond's "Casino Royale" I wanted to use black and white silhouettes on top of simple yet clustered background which uses a specific colours that go with the theme. I plan to go with aboriginal art inspired colours or something similar to the water/air theme that Skyfall had. I could possibly choose to go with two or all of the above colour palettes and simply use each new one for a different scene (zoom into window that represents a new scene beginning as well as a new mini story).
Possible Colour Palette
I have only drawn out the first scene on paper since each scene is surprisingly similar and is better off written down in words, except the last which I also included a drawn version of.
In the first scene we will have a birds eye view on a four story building. The background will be completely black and the building will be red bricked. All of the lights in the widows will be turned off. The camera then zooms into the top left window and music starts playing. The light turns on. The atmosphere is very much similar to that of a sneaking scene in 'pink panther' movies/series.
The windows light presents us with a lovely yet simple scene. Two pitch black, rotoscoped, silhouettes of a man and a woman eating dinner. The background image is similar to clips that played in Casino Royale, moving images of coins and cards with simple palette. The woman presented tries to take out her gun and shoot Bond, however he is quicker to react and shoots her instead. Her silhouette turns from black to the slowly moving image of coins falling, revealing the deepest desires the woman had; wealth. The light turns off and camera zooms out of the window and starts up again where it all began.
In the second shot the camera repeats it's action however with a window across and down. The light turns on to reveal Bond running into the scene with two men trying to attack him. He throws one over his shoulder and shots him while he's on the floor, then shoots the other in the chest. For the first man, his silhouette turns into an image representing fame and the seconds into one representing world in the light of a strong belief such as communism or religion. I wasn't able to simply come up with sweet or innocent desires when it came to enemies of Bond. I wanted to make it realistic and the hard truth so that it'd make the viewer think at the end of the sequence rather than just leave them with an empty feeling. The bullets used for each scene will actually be kinetic typography, presenting credits as they shoot. The letters will then turn red like blood and bounce off the silhouette to represent their passing. I believe the visual metaphor will be very meaningful rather than just having blood and bullets all around.
In the third scene of my sequence I will repeat the window zoom for the last time in the whole video. A similar action scene to the previous two plays out.
Story Board
Maurice Binder
Maurice Binder was an American film title designer who during his life time was involved in 15 James Bond opening sequences. He was approached to create the James Bond opening sequence after creators saw his title sequence for The Grass is Greener (1960). His possibly most famous sequence is Dr. No (1962). Maurice was mostly recognized by the media as the man who invented, or rather came up with, the gun barrel scene that is to this day used in James Bond movies and their parodies. Despite how famous the first of his sequences are, he admits in his last interview before his death that he created them in a great hurry before meeting with the producers. While working on the title sequences he would often include women in them, either those dancing in a sexual manner, with barely or completely no clothing, jumping on a trampoline or in empowering roles with guns. All those portrayed themes which were key in James Bond themes; sex and sadism.
I see Maurice Binder as an enormous inspiration to follow while working on my opening sequence. He created a lot of trade marks for James Bond title sequences that I plan to include in my project as I work along with it. His probable inspiration with Pop Art shows through his work with the choice of bright colours that contrast often black backgrounds and accents, also the lack of shadows shows the influence of pop or aboriginal art. I wish to include all those things into my title sequence and possibly even make small adjustments to the formula that will still work with the chosen theme.
This is the final video I managed to create during this unit. It is posted on YouTube on a mutual's account instead of my vimeo since at the time I finished it, the website wasn't working and he was able to quickly post it on his account and allowed me to link to it. He is also the same person who starred as James Bond in my opening sequence and is credited at the beginning of the video.
Final
Evaluation
As advised I worked on video editing on a new software that we never used before; Premiere Pro. It was an interesting challenge to overcome since I knew none of the options the program had in store and had to work with its newest version. As seen on the above screenshots I have looked up monochrome prints to use as backgrounds for my scenes, downloading them off free websites and setting them behind the people on green screen. It was quite difficult to get the screen to move timed as I had to go onto Effects Control panel and use it similarly to how rigs have to be timed across as key frames. I had to take notice of how big the screen was and re-scale each image to perfectly fit in or the animation of it wouldn't have worked as intended.
I knew that for some of my scenes I wanted to use bullets that'd be fired across the screen. I began creating one in Krita, a drawing program, however it did not looks as good as I wished for it to. Because of this I began working on it in Maya. I created the bullet using a simple cylinder, on which I used the booleans tool to make the nice dent down below. I started texturing it, however every gold texture, as seen above on the middle image, looked like wood instead. This is why at last I chose a yellow texture to use. I think that since the entire video looked as if it was rotoscoped, the yellow texture would be good and stand out against the black and white opening sequence.
These are three renders that I took using Maya after creating physical sky. As seen above each render was very different and had it's good and bad aspects about it. I really liked all of them however in the end I chose the middle render of the bullet to use. It is the simplest one, however it was also most suitable because it fit with the rest of the video in which I used the luna curve to make silhouettes instead of using coloured outlines of the Bond actors. The other two bullets would stand out too much and take away from the video with their unnecessary details and shadows. They also looked much more fizzy than the middle render.
Bullet
This unit's aim is to create a James Bond opening sequence based on those of the past. It is required to film our own material which we then can work on and edit in a program such as Adobe Premiere Pro. This unit is about editing the footage and making it as close to the original material and ideas as possible.
In the very end the camera moves to follow James bond as he runs out of the building onto the terrace. At this point the viewer realizes that the entire sequence was from their perspective and that they are the sniper as they see the gun barrel be made out of the scene, the actor playing out James Bond at this point notices the sniper and shoots them from the opposing building, creating the signature scene however at the end of the opening instead of the beginning .
Progress
To get rid of the Green Screen I used the Ultra Key, to select a colour range. I had to select the brightest and darkest green I could find on the screen which at times was rather hard to make work because the actors' clothes had some green tints in them. In those cases I had to use try and error method to get the best resolution I possibly could without the screen being buggy. After getting rid of the green screen I would use another method to get the characters to be simple silhouettes instead, this worked to some extent however sometimes the shadows would show up also in the scene as silhouettes which made me have to change the colour range again.
During lessons I filmed scenes that would be appropriate for my project. Since I only had two schoolmates to help me out I wasn't able to film the scenes as perfectly as I'd have liked them to turn out, since some parts of the story board had to be changed to fit our short time frame to film and our available equipment. but it was a lot of fun to film every scene out on green screen and using professional equipment in the filming department. After filming I edited the scenes with Premiere.
Working with keyframes to zoom out and into the building silhouette that I drew was very hard since it had to be timed perfectly as well as I had to make sure both the background and actors were in the windows at correct times and that nothing overlapped; which happened a couple times during editing. I was rather glad both the bullet and the house I created were high resolution so that no matter how much I stretched them to fit the scenes they would never loose quality. I later input the music to go with the scenes and tried timing them with the music to make it more dramatic like a proper opening sequence for James Bond.
The theme of the project was to create an opening sequence to a James Bond movie. Since I never watched any of the films I was quite excited to research something new as well as learn a new program (Premiere Pro). The most enjoyable part of the project, personally for me, was filming the scenes using professional equipment. This as well as using a new program allowed me to study new techniques such as playing around with green screen that contained moving actors and not still shots and video editing. One technique I'd like to develop further is using keyframes since it took a lot of time to get the timing right and to edit them.Throughout this project we researched two famous movie editors; Saul Bass and Maurice Binder, looking into both of their work to get inspirations for our own project. Other than the two men we also looked into a couple openings from James Bond to get a rough idea of how our project's finished product should feel and look like. The two editors influenced a lot of my stylistic and storyboard choices, whereas James Bond openings influenced my editing process. As much as I'd like to work on it more, the technique I enjoyed working with the most is key frames and having to work through in between them to make the scenes work. I feel like the most successful part of my project was definitely the planning and storyboard. I had a lot of broad ideas that unfortunately I didn't get to go through with, which I regret and would definitely change if I got to do this project over again. One of these ideas was the bullets bursting against the silhouettes and creating titles/names/ect. Most of my problems were encountered due to not having enough time, too many ideas and not a bread knowledge of the program I was using. Because of this I had to cut down on some of my ideas and make a simpler final version than originally expected.