Brandon Poonwasie's Media Blog

DEXTER title sequence re-edit: Evaluation Questions

1. Summarise the conventions of title sequences that were most important to this task. 

In a title sequence, the people involved in the making of the programme/film must be included. It is often a legal requirement for this to happen, with there being different legal requirements for credits in different countries. Titles have to connote the genre by their colour and font, so that anybody watching can work out the genre from the titles as well as the opening sequence. It should introduce key characters,
In a title sequence, titles need to be placed somewhere where they won't draw attention away/cover up the action that is occurring in the shot, so that narrative flow and the suspension of the audience's disbelief isn't broken.

2. How did your group plan to edit the title sequence? (consider timings, industry requirements etc). 

My group planned to edit it by watching it through a few times, and trying to notice where we could place the titles on the titles, who we would put where, whether there could be a dissolve or fade on the title, and where on the shot the title would be placed. Then we went through and paused each time we wanted to place a title, and after the first title we duplicated the track and changed the text so that it would have a continuous font, size and colour throughout. 

3. Explain the creative decisions made by your group. 

We decided to use red as the font colour because it was the colour of the first and last title on the sequence before we put on our own, and red connotes danger, the colour of blood, so seemed appropriate to get the crime-thriller genre across. The font we used was (I believe) Bahaus Neue, due to it's very blocky font and similarity to the other two titles, and fit nicely onto the shots. We also had to decide whether to fade the titles in/out or not, which we did for one of them because it suited the blood travelling across the screen. For the others we had them cut to with the shot, for example we placed one on the knife, so that they didn't slow down the pace of the editing and therefore the entire opening sequence.

4. How does your re-edit compare to the original?

Our re-edit contained far fewer titles, and fades in a few of them, whereas the original constantly had titles on almost every shot, so with regards to that ours was very different, but given more time may have been similar. However, the titles we did place were similarly positioned to the original ones, so perhaps if there was more time to edit, our re-edit would have been similar to the original.