Useful Websites: Art of the Title

Over the next few posts I'll be explaining about some of the Useful Websites that are linked on this blog. They've all been chosen to either help your work in Film Studies both at GCSE and AS / A-Level, but to also develop your interest in all things related to the Film Industry.

In this post we'll take a quick look at Art of the Title. Art of the Title is a website which looks at the title sequences of films (the information about who stars in and who made the film that you see at the start of a film before any 'action' happens). Those of you who have been in some of my Film lessons will know how much I go on about watching Credits, both at the start and end of films, as they provide you with lots of really interesting and useful information about the film. For filmakers, credits have developed over the last 70 years and are now usually quite long, very artistic and designed to not only tell you about the film but also set up the style of the film. (At some point in the near future I'll do a blog post on the importance of credits and credits sequences-especially useful for Coursework both at GSCE and AS-Level.) With credit sequences being so interesting and artistic in modern cinema, Art of the Title looks at these and breaks them down and explore the style of the credits, the techniques used and usually, interviews some of the key people who helped make them. Below are some pictures of the sorts of things you might find on Art of the Title.

Each film is given it's own post on the blog of the website. You can select the credits for each film by using the side bar on the right hand side of the website. Each post usually starts with an HD clip of the titles from the film, as seen above.

The blog posts usually then goes through some really specific detail about why certain images were chosen and the influences on them, especially in establishing the style of the film.

Some of the posts will also have an interview with someone who helped make the credits and then show how these credits were actually made.

Recently, Art of the Title has also begun to look at the Title Credits of videogames as this is an area which is rapidly growing and many 'big' videogames now have interesting and complicated Title Credit sequences.

Art of the Title is a really interesting look at an area of cinema that many people don't realise just how complicated and how much thought and time is placed on. The website could be useful in coursework for GCSE and AS Level work, but also if you have any interest in art and design, possibly as a career after school.