Opening Titles Analysis (North By Northwest)

The film North By Northwest has a very intriguing and eye-catching opening title sequence, I want to analyse the opening titles and see how they use backdrops and fonts to create such a unique opening title scene.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jIlqatMQSgI

The titles open as a bright green backdrop with multiple black lines feeding in from different angles, these black lines then cross each other and make a patterned background that is later very effectively used to fade in the scene. The text is white to stand out over the green background and the font is fairly bold, not italic or unordinary, just white and clear. This looks quite pleasing to the eye as it is easy to read, and is bought in with a simple swipe in animation. The titles consist of firstly companies involved then main actors, then says 'in Alfred Hitchcock's, North By Northwest'. There is arrows on the text of the title, 'North By Northwest', this could be to give it some kind of uniqueness from the other text and to show it is important and needs to stand out from the rest. What happens next is very effective, the white text disappears and the green backdrop dissolves revealing the side of a corporate looking building of a big business. This is done so effectively because although the green backdrop dissolves out of the shot, the original black crossing lines stay and are lines in the building.

This is a very effective change to cut into a city scene, you can see the moving cars on the busy road in the reflection of the building. Then eventually the shot dissolves again into a set of various different scenes that are displaying a busy road/street/building. This helps set the scene whilst showing the opening credits which is something that is very important in a film. The sounds used in the opening titles are very high string sounds which contribute to the Thriller scene, as they are very renowned sounds for Thriller films, to build tension, suspense or even in this case to set the scene.

I think we should involve elements like the ones used in this films opening titles to help create effective and eye-pleasing opening titles for our Thriller scene. We could take the idea of attempting to set the scene whilst displaying our opening credits, this will help our opening scene flow well and have a good Thriller scene set before any real video screenplay begins.