Having already been warned against shot reverse shot I knew I neared to establish a strong visual style and I hoped making the opening sequence including the credits would help me do that.
My original idea was to have several boxes appearing on the screen with the video in each playing and fitting together. This turned out to look quite messy and very difficult to pull off and even if I managed to put it together just as I had imagined it didn’t really fit in with what I was trying to do elsewhere. I’d already spent a few hours on it but continuing was not the answer.
The original concept:
In trying to develop a new idea I started with finding a new font for the titles. A pet hate of mine is seeing the same automatic fonts used by Microsoft cropping up in people’s films again and again. My top three most despised and over-used would probably be Comic sans, Chiller and Bradley Handwriting. I picked a particularly jolly some might even say playful font in the end because I wanted to keep the film quite light-hearted. To that end I decided it would look better as black on white than white on black which is when it occurred to me what I nice contrast it would make to the dark shots I’d taken of the opening.
The font I setled on:
Once I’d put together the basic credits framework I thought about how I could make it more visually interesting. The idea of having speedy drawings appear next to names appealed to me so I searched the internet for a basic program for recording your drawings. What I found wasn’t ideal as the black on white came out slightly grey making the use of chroma key impossible and the files took ages to render but I worked round this with what I would call some skilful resizing.
I picked pictures that would apply well to the names but have a simple childish charm to them. I used a picture of Fern and Joe on the title slide to briefly confirm in the audiences mind the premises; Joe has just broken up with his girlfriend. I used the final broken heart similarly.
Sketchy drawings of Joe and Fern:
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