"Bass" on the line

Here is Saul Bass talking to us about his work and process and in depth about some of his title sequences:

After watching this video i feel i have a slightly wider understanding of the "Bass" and his creative works and backgrounds. I was very interested in his development from and extremely graphics based working process with lot of animation and lines to his journey through to real life footage for the titles he created. But something that remains consistant throughout most work is the need for symbolic references to both title and to establish mood and give the audience some type of breif understanding of the film to come. For example Otto Preminger's "The Man with the golden arm" he explains the arm's jaggerd form is representive of drug addiction and also the use of a Cat in the opening of Edward Dmytryk's 1962 "Walk on the wild side" where as the black cat striding around whilst the camera tracks it reflects on the quite cool swift movie to come.

Bass also explains that his title openings in later films become some type of prologue to the film instead of just pure credits and title. It developed into the films begining already started before the end of the title comes up. I think there is something brilliant about Saul Bass's graphic animations, real life titles and the transitionary period between the two, he seemed to have always kept and developed with the time such as "Vertgo" where the crazy colour swirls would of been something brilliant of the time as he developed and played with new ideas... go on THE "BASS".

Saul Bass

Saul Bass is most probably one of the most influenctial title seqeunce creaters of modern cinema. But why is his work so recognizable? His use of lines and text have a very graphic design feel and his use of bold block colour and animation. But he has made many titles with a more cinematic feel.

He worked on big titles such as:

Alfred Hitchcocks - North by Northwest 1959
A great example of Saul bass and the use of lines. It's also nice that it faded in to the building and the city.

Ridley Scott's - Alien 1979
With a slow build up and music building tension the viewer is waiting to see some change in the shot as it slow pans, but instead lines appear slowly building up text. I think this sequence is reall good at building suspense and i think sets the mood for the film. ( This sequence alos inculdes Bass's signiture line theme.)


Alfred Hitchcocks - Psycho 1960

With quite dramatic music and constant flow of new lines this sequence keeps a pace and is consatnly on the move.

The Brief

To create an opening Title seqeunce for a genre of our choice (which we are yet to discuss.) Looking into some of our favourite opening title seqeunce's and what about them would infleunce are sequence.
http://www.artofthetitle.com/about/ Has lots of helpfull information on the "Title sequence" creation process.

------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------

Groupings: (Team Awsome)

Here are my fellow Amigo's Blogs:

Adam Blackmore : http://blog-job69.blogspot.com/
Ross Wood: http://just-another-blog-again.blogspot.com/
Joseph Smith: Your already on it silly.

As Level Continuity Piece

(Sorry bad upload qaulity)

A teacher pupil type scenario, we attempted to incorporate continuity filming techniques to put across the relationship between characters through angles like the high angle shot on the pupil giving the feeling of him being lower/lesser of the pupil to teacher. We also did some low angle shots of the teacher so that the viewer has to look up at the teacher giving the teacher power and status. We know haveing a story was of no importance but we just felt it would'nt look as "awkward" if there was a basic narrative.

We included other shots to try and give the film a natural pace (unlike another film we've made). You will see other shots including the pan, over the shoulder the panning shot etc.

As you can tell from Ross's"improvisation" this piece was unscripted which shows through but was not really a problem.