Opening Sequence Planning (Inspiration)

I looked at a few openings that I thought worked well and thought about what they did to make it work so well, and how it was done.

I looked at 3 Title Sequences in detail, 2 films and 1 TV show. These were; Evil Dead, Afro Samurai Resurrection, and True Blood. I also took a look at Dexter but not in as much depth.

Afro Samurai

From Afro Samurai, I looked at the manga type drawings and minimal animation used as I thought it worked very well and looked very effective even though it was simple and did not look to difficult to pull off for the most of it.

I found it intersting because it was an animated opening but it did not have much animation, much of it was still drawings. This drew my attention as it is something that could be possible to do without too much hassle.

Evil Dead

Evil Dead is made very effective by the connotations and enigma codes and is enhanced heavily by soundtrack used. The music is very creepy and outs you on edge, mainly because of the assosiations that sound created by the music has with the genre of horror. It conforms to the conventions of horror film in both the audio and in the Visuals. The visuals is based mainly on the theme of blood. It connotes this first with the red text, and then throughout with the constant red and black, and with the constant peircing and slicing/cutting movements which are always followed by blood splattering or dripping. It is intreseting how it almost made completely out of red and black, and the images of objects are made out of shading with red on the black. The only colour there is apart from black is different shades of red. This is also an abstract opening. This was good for ideas, but would be very hard to try and replicate so an idea whic will most likely not be run with.

True Blood

This is another abstract opening. It hints on the themes of the show, such as vampires, blood, sex etc. But it does not show us any of the characters of the show, or tell us anything about the plot. It constantly reminds us of death, by showing us dead animals, at the start the first thing we see is what looks to be a dead fis, soon followed by a crocodile, which also appears to be lifeless. It also shows us a pouncing snake, dead meat in a butchers, and a dead rat on the road in a blood splatter aswell as more examples of this. It also hints there could possibly a predator, probably a vampire, with the church billboard that says "God Hates Fangs." (0:45) This is also important as religion is a prominant theme in this opening sequence. There are many snippets of church services and mentions of God within the sequence.