“In the mid-90s you saw this great resurgence in terms of attention to main titles,” Wall notes. In the next decade, however, everything changed. This is the era of The A-Team and Quantum Leap. Many classic sitcoms did this effectively – remember the openings of Beverly Hillbillies or Gilligan’s Island? - but it nearly always failed with dramatic shows. The conventions of the mini-genre settled to the degree that cloying sitcom titles have found a second life on the internet as a parody engine, inspiring mock opening credits for hyper-dramatic shows ( especially Breaking Bad), as well as Adult Swim’s Too Many Cooks, one of the best pieces of satire of the past few years.Īnd for other dramas – shows that younger people will primarily remember as the source material for bad movies – titles often served a more practical purpose, in particular explaining the often absurd concept of the show in the least artful way imaginable. With a few notable exceptions, for years title sequences were formulaic. Even one of the more ambitious early intros, for The Honeymooners, is still little more than a background for an announcer to read off the names of the cast and let the audience in the living room know it’s time to sit down. Early title sequences were purely functional and stripped-down, reflecting the nature of the production. In a New York Times story from 1992 about Castle Bryant Johnsen – the group behind the title sequences for, among other shows, Cheers, Moonlighting and The X-Files, designer Bruce Bryant calls them “very little films”. During an interview with the website Art of the Title, Sopranos showrunner David Chase describes the show’s title sequence as “its own little movie”. “I really thought of the title sequence as being its own sort of art film,” he says.ĭescribing title sequences as their own short movies is a line that has been repeated consistently across the history of television. It makes sense, then, that Transparent’s title sequence is so good – Ernst is first and foremost an experimental film-maker. That’s how you get everything from The Wire’s seasonal riffs on Tom Waits and urban decay to American Horror Story’s disjointed suggestions of wrongness (often much scarier than the show itself) to Homeland’s jazzy, mournful and unfairly maligned exploration of espionage and confusion.Īs Angus Wall, the head of title design firm Elastic (perhaps most notable for the dramatic Game of Thrones opening), puts it, title sequences are “little experimental films that actually have to function”. As streaming and cable have warped and widened the boundaries of what TV can do, title sequences have changed to reflect those new possibilities. There’s actually a lot more competition for that ring than you might expect. It was very emotionally driven.” He succeeded – Transparent has one of the best TV title sequences in recent memory. Rhys Ernst, a film-maker and producer on the show who worked on the sequence, says about hunting down archival footage: “I was looking for a feeling of intimacy, and a feeling of belonging. A pastiche of family footage from weddings and bar mitzvahs, scenes from the 1968 drag documentary The Queen and a few original shots indistinguishable from the “authentic” ones, everything in Transparent’s title sequence functions in service of a particular sort of heartache.
0 Comments
Leave a Reply. |
AuthorWrite something about yourself. No need to be fancy, just an overview. ArchivesCategories |