This title is about titles.
Feb. 26th, 2010 07:12 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
bironicTuesday after work I went down to the Navy Archives for a talk by Kyle Cooper, who does title sequences for movies and TV. (He's the guy behind the opening credits for the new Sherlock Holmes, Seven, Dawn of the Dead, Spiderman 2, Across the Universe, Pushing Daisies, the Sci Fi Channel, and dozens of others—even Blades of Glory, ![[livejournal.com profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/external/lj-userinfo.gif)
ignazwisdom!) As someone who's done some video editing for fun and at various jobs, as a budding vidder, and as a lover of good movie titles, I thought his presentation was fascinating.
Cooper is a graphic designer by training, and his passion is for typography—for making letters do what the words mean. Hearing that teased out themes in the credits he screened: things like the A, C, T and G highlighted first in Gattaca, the titles of Spiderman flicking and catching like flies caught in a web, the formless shadows you move through until you pull back and see that they're the letters i-n-d-e-c-e-n-t matched up with the same number of letters in p-r-o-p-o-s-a-l. It's nice to be reminded that visual art loves a metaphor as much as literature does.
(I was going to link to each of these, but the Flash site makes it impossible, so if you have the patience, click around in there.)
At the same time, he talked about how he learned that it's less important for opening sequences to embody a metaphor for the movie than it is for them to lead into the first scene. Also that it's his job to reflect the director's (his client's) vision and not make a completely different animal of his own, and how he grew to love stripped-down methods that rely on editing techniques rather than animation—for instance, Wimbledon—although he's coming back around to appreciating the fancier stuff like in Holmes.
He told us that Dawn of the Dead used stock footage because they had no budget to shoot original footage, and it's chopped up and flickery because the director wanted him to establish a sense of global panic. In one of my favorite tidbits of the night, he said that while everyone he talked to told him he couldn't make letters bleed without using expensive software, he decided to just print the titles on an old printer, hang them sideways, spray them with acetone, film them, and then turn them right side up again on the computer.
He also had funny stories about bug wranglers on the Mimic set—the guy who, after having a phone conversation with Cooper beforehand about the stick insects and whatnot Cooper wanted him to bring, showed up with paper cups of half-dead earwigs and then scrounged around outside for the other insects Cooper wanted. Also, apparently director Guillermo del Toro wanted to see a beetle stuck through with a pin but the insect rights woman looked horrified, so Cooper bent a pin like one of those fake arrows-through-the-head and wrapped it around the beetle's body. And later taped a dead beetle to the scrolling credits next to the line about how no bugs were harmed during the filming? I think that was the movie he said he'd done it for.
Throughout the evening, he kept coming back to obsessiveness. The event had started late because he'd been trying to get the aspect ratio just right on the podium Mac for about 40 minutes. That was so he could properly show the DVD menu he'd created, a text map of directors he'd worked with and places he'd trained, which had nested layers such that he'd click one name to reset everything, a part of the license plate in the center to highlight six names, one of those names to highlight six different ones, etc., to get to what he wanted to show. He called attention to all of this with a mix of pride and self-deprecation, but mostly when he talked about obsession it was in relation to his artistic process—how he spends hours and hours in the editing program cutting and cutting and cutting and cutting until he likes what he has. That he has always been this way and it's part of what makes his work high-quality. That if you ask who the best people in the business are, it's the ones who immerse themselves for a week in a pitch, who stay up night after night while they're working on a project, not to make money or impress people but because they're just driven to, to get the final product they want. I can relate to that. Probably many of us can.
And here he is, one of the biggest names in the business with two companies to his name, now working on things like Julie Taymor's The Tempest and a remake of a movie that I wrote down but have forgotten.
Not bad for a guy from north Boston whose guidance counselor told him he could never make a living drawing monsters.
Neat related YouTube playlist at http://www.youtube.com/view_play_list?p=AA7C3A76AEAB8D79
ignazwisdom!) As someone who's done some video editing for fun and at various jobs, as a budding vidder, and as a lover of good movie titles, I thought his presentation was fascinating. Cooper is a graphic designer by training, and his passion is for typography—for making letters do what the words mean. Hearing that teased out themes in the credits he screened: things like the A, C, T and G highlighted first in Gattaca, the titles of Spiderman flicking and catching like flies caught in a web, the formless shadows you move through until you pull back and see that they're the letters i-n-d-e-c-e-n-t matched up with the same number of letters in p-r-o-p-o-s-a-l. It's nice to be reminded that visual art loves a metaphor as much as literature does.
(I was going to link to each of these, but the Flash site makes it impossible, so if you have the patience, click around in there.)
At the same time, he talked about how he learned that it's less important for opening sequences to embody a metaphor for the movie than it is for them to lead into the first scene. Also that it's his job to reflect the director's (his client's) vision and not make a completely different animal of his own, and how he grew to love stripped-down methods that rely on editing techniques rather than animation—for instance, Wimbledon—although he's coming back around to appreciating the fancier stuff like in Holmes.
He told us that Dawn of the Dead used stock footage because they had no budget to shoot original footage, and it's chopped up and flickery because the director wanted him to establish a sense of global panic. In one of my favorite tidbits of the night, he said that while everyone he talked to told him he couldn't make letters bleed without using expensive software, he decided to just print the titles on an old printer, hang them sideways, spray them with acetone, film them, and then turn them right side up again on the computer.
He also had funny stories about bug wranglers on the Mimic set—the guy who, after having a phone conversation with Cooper beforehand about the stick insects and whatnot Cooper wanted him to bring, showed up with paper cups of half-dead earwigs and then scrounged around outside for the other insects Cooper wanted. Also, apparently director Guillermo del Toro wanted to see a beetle stuck through with a pin but the insect rights woman looked horrified, so Cooper bent a pin like one of those fake arrows-through-the-head and wrapped it around the beetle's body. And later taped a dead beetle to the scrolling credits next to the line about how no bugs were harmed during the filming? I think that was the movie he said he'd done it for.
Throughout the evening, he kept coming back to obsessiveness. The event had started late because he'd been trying to get the aspect ratio just right on the podium Mac for about 40 minutes. That was so he could properly show the DVD menu he'd created, a text map of directors he'd worked with and places he'd trained, which had nested layers such that he'd click one name to reset everything, a part of the license plate in the center to highlight six names, one of those names to highlight six different ones, etc., to get to what he wanted to show. He called attention to all of this with a mix of pride and self-deprecation, but mostly when he talked about obsession it was in relation to his artistic process—how he spends hours and hours in the editing program cutting and cutting and cutting and cutting until he likes what he has. That he has always been this way and it's part of what makes his work high-quality. That if you ask who the best people in the business are, it's the ones who immerse themselves for a week in a pitch, who stay up night after night while they're working on a project, not to make money or impress people but because they're just driven to, to get the final product they want. I can relate to that. Probably many of us can.
And here he is, one of the biggest names in the business with two companies to his name, now working on things like Julie Taymor's The Tempest and a remake of a movie that I wrote down but have forgotten.
Not bad for a guy from north Boston whose guidance counselor told him he could never make a living drawing monsters.
Neat related YouTube playlist at http://www.youtube.com/view_play_list?p=AA7C3A76AEAB8D79
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Date: Feb. 27th, 2010 12:20 am (UTC)no subject
Date: Feb. 27th, 2010 12:39 am (UTC)no subject
Date: Feb. 27th, 2010 03:31 am (UTC)no subject
Date: Feb. 27th, 2010 04:04 am (UTC)no subject
Date: Feb. 27th, 2010 02:21 pm (UTC)Yeah. I'll bet most of us can. :-) Obsessiveness is one of the qualities I suspect most fans share, and those of us who write and/or vid probably tend to resemble this remark!