Comments on: Titles on the Fringe

By: Mark

Mark — Tue, 29 Sep 2009 16:19:30 +0000

another similar treatment that I really like is on I Robot when Will Smith is talking to the active video of the dead Dr. on the entry floor. I can figure out the embedded video but adding the camera move was the icing on the cake. Anyone have an idea on this one also. I expect they were done similarly to the floating embedded titles.

By: Mark

Mark — Tue, 29 Sep 2009 16:12:55 +0000

So we know who does the embedded title treatment but does anyone know how or with what software it was done with? are the clips split with the graphic then layered in?

Thanks

By: Michael D.

Michael D. — Mon, 22 Sep 2008 22:14:11 +0000

Yes, Dan, I had caught the Variety article that the above article you linked to, has itself linked to, and was going to post that here…I had just forgotten. Thanks.

By: Dan North

Dan North — Mon, 22 Sep 2008 20:41:21 +0000

By the way, Mike’s mention of Paul Grainge’s terrific article referred me to this interesting post on studio logos at Aspect Ratio. It chimes with what Bob and I were saying about manipulated logos:

http://aspectratio.wordpress.com/2008/09/05/studio-logos-by-association/

By: Dan North

Dan North — Mon, 22 Sep 2008 20:01:48 +0000

Thanks, Mike. Yes, it is interesting when a very vivid memory turns out to be false (or maybe I just remembered the Superman III titles most!), the problem being that you can always check with a movie, so I can’t blag it! For another example, I once had an argument with a friend over the type of sweets/candy Elliot leaves a trail of for E.T. to follow. My friend thought it was Reese’s Pieces, and I swore blind it was M&Ms. I specifically remember E.T. being used as a launchpad for M&Ms in the UK, since they’d previously been unavailable. I’ve seen the film again and obviously I was wrong, but I still suspect that there may have been a “special edition” sponsored by M&Ms and recut accordingly to place their product and released in the UK! But a more likely theory is that the novelisation featured M&Ms instead. Even more likely is that I was seven years old at the time and my brain got a bit fuzzed in subsequent decades.

By: Michael D.

Michael D. — Fri, 19 Sep 2008 20:20:00 +0000

My mentor Paul Grainge (University of Nottingham) wrote an article and book which contains elements of an argument on studio logos and what I will call their “metamorphing.” His book is called “Brand Hollywood,” and I believe that his article was earlier published in an issue of Screen.

By the way, if I may be so bold (sorry, Dan), none of the Superman films’ opening credits were ever placed over the Metropolis/Manhattan skyline, although Superman III’s huge, intrusive credits flowed directly “out of” downtown Metropolis as Superman saves a city in chaos. All the rest of the Superman franchise contemporary live-action feature films featured the titles in space, and/or over Earth or in some nebulous region (Supergirl). Interesting that you remember it that way, however…it says something for the imagery of the film(s).

By: Bob Rehak

Bob Rehak — Fri, 19 Sep 2008 13:00:48 +0000

On closer examination, "diegetic spread" does sound like something one would use on toast instead of butter ... "diegetic sprawl" and "diegetic leakage" are no improvement, but perhaps come nearer to what I was intending. Excellent reading of Panic Room's (and Seven's) title logic. Fincher has said he wanted the opening of Panic Room to convey expansive scale in contrast to the airtight "interior" of the film. To me, the movie enacts a remarkable calculus of claustrophobia and freedom, mingling transparency and opacity through visual devices like the embedded titles and "x-ray" traveling shots (which themselves came in for criticism from some quarters), the mise-en-scene of the sealed, impervious panic room (a "black box" counterintuitively perforated by video surveillance), even the extratextual factor of Jodie Foster's disavowed (or unavowed) queer identity -- itself a kind of black-boxed star image. I've listed the few instances of logo play that come to my mind, but will ponder further the question of Columbia's logo lady. (Didn't she get revamped and modernized a few years ago a la Betty Crocker?) I think 20th Century Fox's logo did something unusual before the X-Men films, fading out but leaving a subtle little glow around the "x." And it seems to me there's been some musical manipulation of the famous 20th-C Fox intro; in '77 they appended the Cinemascope extension, written by Alfred Newman in 1954, to the opening of Star Wars, and Alien Resurrection (if I remember correctly) has the same musical notes dropping into a minor, "horrific" key as a segue into the film.

By: Dan North

Dan North — Fri, 19 Sep 2008 09:11:50 +0000

Bob, I’m going to try to use the phrase “diegetic spread” every day from now on.

It’s a while since I’ve seen Panic Room, so I can’t quite remember if there was any particular significance to the embedded titles, except to flag up the importance of walls and corners and hiding places inside urban space. And the titles lurk unnoticed, even though they’re HUGE. Actually, that’s significant enough, I reckon. The opening titles on Seven are often cited as a landmark, but the scratchy electroshock aesthetic doesn’t really encapsulate the meticulous, self-assured calm of the serial killer it depicts. In fact, those titles make it easier to write him off as a fractured, deranged mind rather than the “alternatively reasonable” guy the film wants you to be frightened by.

I had imagined there were lots of manipulations of studio logos, but I can’t really think of any now that I need to. I seem to recall the Columbia Pictures logo lady doing something undignified, but I may have dreamed that one up…

By: Bob Rehak

Bob Rehak — Wed, 17 Sep 2008 10:46:49 +0000

Dan, great connection to the titles on Donner's 1978 Superman -- one of the trio of films I cite for my students when they ask "What's your favorite movie?" (The others are Star Wars -- the one and only 1977 version -- and Alien, 1979.) Funny, though; I don't think of those zooming translucent titles as being "embedded" in the same sense as the Fringe or Panic Room graphics, despite their clear ties to rest of Superman's color palette and the crystalline motif that characterizes Krypton and the Fortress of Solitude. Not sure why that is. The swooshing titles appear again in Singer's Superman Returns, but less effectively -- pale, hurried CG remediations of Donner & co.'s work. The microgenre piece can be found in Film Criticism 32:1 (2007). Yes, my genealogy of bullet time does discuss Dalton Taylor, as well as Tim McMillan -- just some of the effect's multiple authors. My friend Mark Wolf has a great piece on Taylor, time-slice, and bullet time: "Space, Time, Frame, Cinema: Exploring the Possibilities of Spatiotemporal Effects," in New Review of Film and Television Studies 4:3 (2006). Interesting idea about the graphic contagion of studio logos (I noticed it in The Matrix, which "greenifies" the Warner Brothers tag, but my favorite instance is probably the "global warming" effect applied to the Universal globe in Waterworld). Not sure I would call this a diegetic spread so much as a mutation of branding ... but it's worth investigating!

By: Dan North

Dan North — Tue, 16 Sep 2008 22:52:26 +0000

And another thing – if you wanted to taxonomise this particular phenomenon, you might also be interested in the increasingly stale tendency to adjust the studio logo to fit the theme of the film, also transgressing the boundary between diegesis and er, other stuff (I can’t remember what they call the bits that go before the title sequence):

http://www.ropeofsilicon.com/article/always_customizeable_studio_logo/