Research - Production Title Design

I am back at it again, readers! 

Since last post, where I set my sights on making specifically a film noir opening. I have noticed that the subgenre has become quite obscure in recent times, with most seemingly noir films from 20 years ago not even falling into the category itself. So now my research is limited to mostly noir films from the mid-to-late 20th century.

Anyways, last time you saw from me I said that I would be looking at specific titles of a film, and no, I am not referring to a movie itself, as I have done many times before. Today, I want to look at typical features of a production title (a.k.a. working title) of film noir, including key words, fonts, and color!

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Occasionally, the genre of a film can be easily identified by the naming of the film. In film noir, typical elements of murder, urban settings, and mystery are usually expressed in the film's titles. Take words like "street" and "night" for example. The plot of many noir films take place at night in an urban area, when most are asleep, and danger is out and about, take a title like Night Without Sleep (1952) for example. The combination of murder and romance was also common, such as Kiss of Death (1947). The mystery elements of these films are what define the subgenre as a whole, films like Mysterious Intruder (1946).

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With key words like these in mind, I now want to shift my focus on design elements of a working title, these being color and most importantly font. There are a plethora of fonts used throughout noir film, usually involving blocky text with an imitated 3D effect, take the opening of White Heat (1949), for example, which uses a hand-drawn font with a slight squiggle to the linework, possibly a nod to the "heat" in the film's title.

                    White Heat (1949)

If I were to take a similar approach with my brief's title artwork, I perused the site 1001 Fonts, the same site I used for the font in my magazine cover assignment I posted just a few months ago, and found two fonts that replicate the classic noir style: Francois One and Poppins (specifically semi-bold).

 

Though this style of title design is well known in older films, I would still rather create something closer to modern era film rather than something that dwells on the past for my brief. What I in the films Palmetto (1998) and Romeo Is Bleeding (1993) are not much different from films that released decades prior. Though the only working title I found in footage paired with Palmetto comes from a trailer, it creates a 3D effect similar to older films, and is paired with a brilliant orange sunset, which is a great change of pace from the typical black and white. The font used closely resembles the font Compacta.

                    Palmetto (1998)

Prior to the opening for Romeo Is Bleeding, the title is written in a font similar to Trajan Pro on a black background. It is very simple compared to the rest of the ones found throughout today's research, so I will most likely not be referring back to it for inspiration come design time. (The opening can be found on YouTube, but I will not be including it in my sources due to excessive blood during one scene.)

                    Romeo Is Bleeding (1993)

As for the colors used in the production titles that I have seen today, they all look to simply use black and white, even in the two films that actually had the ability to give these more color. I would also look at the posters of these films to see what colors or maybe even different fonts are used in the designs there, but for my brief I am simply filming the opening, so I will leave my research on color to that.

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Before researching, I was expecting to see a variety of different title design conventions that would have left me overwhelmed when it came time to designing my own, but am glad to see that there is a somewhat universal connection between most of these that seek for the audience's attention, even without using extravagant fonts or over-the-top effects. I have definitely been inspired to at least capture the 3D effect and monochromatic coloring of most of these titles, with the font being the only real feature I should put most of my thought into. I think I am leaning towards using a font with more clean lines, like Francois One, to keep with the more simple title designs of the subgenre.

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Sources used for information:

https://www.classicfilmnoir.com/2014/09/how-to-title-your-film-noir.html

https://www.imdb.com/title/tt0042041/

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IPHZdSAyiUQ

https://www.imdb.com/title/tt0120782/

https://www.imdb.com/title/tt0107983/

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Next post I will be going over two possible editing applications I can use for when filming is all said and done, comparing them by my personal experiences using them, and their pros and cons. Thanks for reading, see you soon!