Behind the Title By Shiva Kansagara Cover photo from Spiderman: No Way Home title sequence
An introduction is an important ice-breaker when meeting someone new. This brief exchange between two or more individuals opens up avenues for conversation and connections. Most of all, it is a chance to make a first impression. Books typically have a prologue that functions to set-up the story or establish the tone, theme, or context and ease the reader into the world she is stepping into. Movies have a similar type of introduction that is usually expressed in the form of a title sequence –– the medium that films and television series utilize to present their work titles, names of directors, producers, and cast members, and their credentials. Title sequences have been an element of films and TV content since the early 1900s, however title sequence art did not become common until the late 1950s when graphic designer Saul Bass popularized such art. Title art combines graphic design with animation to create stunning, colorful motion graphics that aim to capture the audiences’ attention prior to the actual start of the film.
A decade later, in the 1960s, Cuban designer Pablo Ferro entered the scene. Ferro pioneered several new animation and editing techniques that would revolutionize the way title sequences were created up until his passing in 2018. What is it about these title sequence techniques that made them so popular? How do certain title sequence effects impact the audience? For example, do certain techniques impact the emotional experience or even how the viewer interprets the content? What was the inspiration for Ferro’s novel techniques? Based on these questions, I ask the follow-up question: how do Pablo Ferro’s editing techniques used within his title sequences change the way audiences view the rest of the film? More broadly, how does the medium of title sequence art affect the viewer’s experience of consuming the remaining content of the film?
Title sequence art, which typically runs within the first five to ten minutes of a film, is one of the first visuals the audience experiences when starting a movie or television series. So arguably, the title sequence should be an attention grabber. However, title sequences were not always meant for attention. According to the online blog No Film School, “the opening credits in the classical era acted as a transitional moment” –– while the lights dimmed and curtain rose –– “and didn’t demand the audience to watch them because the credits didn’t add up to the film’s narrative” (par. 6). Eventually, plain, black-screened title art transformed into more innovative visuals. Directors took the opportunity to augment the film through title art that provided context for the film. When Saul Bass made the first visually interesting title sequence using motion graphics for the movie Carmen Jones in 1954 (later Ocean’s 11 in 1960, and Goodfellas in 1990), a new precedent was set. Filmmakers realized that title sequences held the potential to “tell the overarching theme of the film to reveal the tone before an actor walked onto the silver screen” (No Film School par. 9). In a title sequence, from the color scheme to the timing to the music, each choice contributes to the overall tone; the artist is setting and building the world that the audience is about to enter. Title art could even be an art form unrelated to the medium of the film itself. For example, the art could take the form of an animation, a claymation, paper art, drawings, or even live action. All of these choices are intentional for telling a miniature story within the title sequence itself. Whether the aim is to introduce the audience to the main character(s), possibly express a bit about the character’s personality, or foreshadow what is to come in the film, title sequences have a story arc of some kind that begins to build the world of the film or show.
In her Hypercinema class at New York University, Sarah Rothberg teaches students that title sequence form follows the concept of “onboarding.” According to Oxford Dictionary, “onboarding” is formally “the action or process of integrating a new employee into an organization or familiarizing a new customer with one’s products or services.” Rothberg proposes that the same process must be followed when beginning a film. The audience should be familiarized with the content they are about to watch, as well as be introduced to the folks who created the work. Nowadays, audiences expect to see a title sequence. Simply recognizing a director, cinematographer, or actor’s name from previous media they worked on might indicate a certain genre or style the audience might expect to see. Nonetheless, if the names listed in the title sequence are unrecognizable, it gives the audience a chance to discover new artists and expand their taste. Another important aspect of onboarding is its function of saving time. When a viewer is appropriately onboarded to a film or show, it allows the director to focus more on the story, rather than spending time setting the tone of the piece. While it is still the director's job to construct the fictional or non-fictional universe that orients the audience within the first ten minutes of the film, a title sequence might do half that job by establishing the color palette, the music, and the film’s genre.
Pablo Ferro’s animated art –– whether it was a product advertisement, a film trailer, or a film title sequence –– was in high demand because his techniques could successfully onboard his viewers. As a result, Ferro enjoyed a career of more than forty years in the industry, beginning in the early 1960s. Stanley Kubrick’s Dr. Strangelove (1964) was Ferro’s first title sequence project. In the film’s title sequence, two aircraft are shown: one is refueling the other mid-air through the attachment of respective male and female aircraft parts. These visuals are intended to be the first of many sexual references throughout the film. The titles, in a handwritten font, fade in atop the naval aircraft imagery. Some letters are much larger, longer, or thicker than others and are arranged in no particular format. Dr. Strangelove is a dark comedy about the corrupting effects of power examined through the larger context of The Cold War. The thin and haphazard spacing of the credits text implies that the film is not meant to be taken seriously; it is a satire. This typography in combination with the sexual aircraft imagery achieves a foreshadowing effect –– that this film is ridiculing the political climate during the late 1940s. It signaled to the audience that it was appropriate to laugh at the content in the film. On the other hand, if the text followed more uniform spacing and alignment, and was presented as a serif font, it might indicate that the film should be taken seriously. But, that is not the case here. Handwritten typography soon became one of Pablo Ferro’s signature techniques.
Saul Bass, who was previously mentioned to be an even more well-known and respected title sequence designer, was inspired by Ferro’s handwritten lettering and incorporated that into his work. Decades later, handwritten typography remains a beloved effect. There is a whole category of fonts and typefaces that fall under the “handwriting” style: Amatic SC, Permanent Marker, and Indie Flower, to name a few. Video collages that many teenagers and young people edit for social media have used this technique to annotate the videos and draw doodles over their clips. The font aligns with the youthful, playful, and even grunge aesthetic of the video collage –– the same reasons why Ferro used handwritten typography throughout his career. He utilized this technique on many other major films, such as The Addams Family (1991), American Heart (1992), Men in Black (1997), and Men in Black II (2002).
After working with Stanley Kubrick, who is a highly acclaimed director, Ferro’s job offers kept flowing. He acquired project after project. Ferro relished in the attention that came with his fame. His New York apartment looked as if it was straight out of a movie, according to his close friends: he had a hot tub, a hammock, fun chairs, and secret passageways all around. Women were constantly coming in and out of the place; it smelled like weed everywhere. Working on film title sequences changed Ferro’s lifestyle.
Four years after Ferro did the Dr. Strangelove title sequence, The Thomas Crown Affair (1968) was released into theaters and Ferro’s contribution was, once again, highly innovative. As the sequence starts, characters from the film appear in split screen rectangles, which are composed in various arrangements. All hues of the rainbow overlay the videos. Some of the screens change before others to reveal another character in a rhythmic fashion. In the sequence itself, Pablo Ferro was credited for creating the “Multiple Screens” effect. Given that this was the first time split screens were used in title sequence art, many film enthusiasts approved of the effect and adopted it into their own work.
Prior to becoming a title sequence animator, Ferro was a comic book artist who worked with Stan Lee, founder of the widely beloved Marvel Comics. In the documentary on Ferro, simply called Pablo (2012), Stan Lee commented that Ferro brought “the comic book sensibility to the television screen” (Pablo 19:29). Similarly in comic books, split screens allow the director to tell multiple parts of a story on one screen. This is a powerful tool because it can overwhelm the viewer with information. The split screen should be cohesive and ensure that the audience does not get lost amongst the various moving parts. Paper comic books allow a reader to look at one box at a time, while reading back and forth between them to truly understand the story. On screen, the viewer is expected to watch all of the boxes as they appear simultaneously with one another. Amongst the split screens Ferro created, he found a way of ensuring that his various screens “talk” or respond to one another, permitting the viewer to focus on one screen at a time whilst the other plays in their peripheral. Not only were Ferro’s split screens evocative of comic book art and “as fun to look at as the illustrations in the comics,” they worked significantly well with the rest of the film (Pablo 10:14).
The Thomas Crown Affair (1968) is a romance and heist drama about billionaire Thomas Crown who plans and carries out a scheme to rob a bank. After meeting a woman who works for the bank’s insurance company, the couple is in dissension, yet the two begin a budding romance. The split screens in the title sequence are reminiscent of paintings in a gallery. Incorporating video footage of the characters from the film within these screens was an effective way to suggest that these characters were being “framed,” thus unobtrusively foreshadowing the heist that occurs later on in the film. Since Ferro’s initial use of the split screen, it has become a largely popular effect in opening sequences nowadays.
However, the split screen did not begin with different visuals in each frame. Initially, it was used to dramatize a single scene. For example, in Grand Prix (1966), Saul Bass used a split screen in the introductory credits. For this effect, a singular clip was repeated about sixty four times over the screen. That created an overwhelming, yet mesmerizing sensation. He goes on to tell the readers of his novel, Saul Bass: A Life in Film and Design that “as far as [he’s] concerned, [he’ll] never use it again” because “as a device, it’s lost its currency.” Yet, despite the effect’s overuse, the technique is still effective in expressing reactions of multiple characters simultaneously, whether it is through a phone call conversation, or reactions to news being received, or even to show a situation occurring multiple ways if something minor has changed in each timeline. Ferro’s split screen effect, which was birthed as a title sequence, impacted the entire film industry.
Ferro’s life was not easy or always full of work. In 1970, “a hit man came to [Ferro’s] door and it was the wrong door,” says Pablo in an interview with Art of the Title (par. 46). He lived in an apartment in Lower Manhattan, NYC, on the second floor. When Ferro opened the door, the stranger immediately shot Ferro in the neck, mistaking him for someone else. Ferro was “completely paralyzed for a year and completely rehabilitated himself” (Art of the Title par. 50). At that point, no work was flowing his way. His reputation was poor because Ferro’s brother had taken over Ferro’s company and had made some bad business decisions. Ferro was sad all the time, he was not eating, and he felt invisible. When Ferro got a call from his friend Hal Ashby, a director, who offered Ferro a job, things started picking up. He left New York to move to Los Angeles and work on all of Hal’s trailers and titles. They were loyal to one another. Pablo reminisces, “he’s been saving my life all his life” (Pablo 1:12:16). They were one another’s security. Ferro found his passion for the art again. Right at that time, Ferro received a call to work with Kubrick on another project: A Clockwork Orange.
Ferro’s last and most recognizable technique is called fast-cutting. He initially launched this effect when working on a trailer for Stanley Kubrick’s A Clockwork Orange (1972). Footage from the film rises into frame, when suddenly words flash for a single frame atop the graphic in Futura Extra Bold font: “witty,” “funny,” “satiric,” “musical,” “exciting,” “bizarre,” and the list goes on. The graphic quickly zooms out to reveal more footage from the film. As the title, “A Clockwork Orange” fades in, multiple titles in lower opacity are duplicated around the main title while various colors strobe in the background of the title(s). For the rest of the trailer, more descriptive words are exchanged with clips –– that seem to be sped up –– from the film itself. The trailer is fast-paced, likely indicating that the film follows a similar pace (perhaps a projection of how the audience might feel while watching the film). This film is a disturbing, dystopian thriller about a teenager who undergoes psychological treatment in response to the abominable crimes he commits on people. Ferro’s fast-cut trailer reflects the whirlwind of emotions that might arise as one watches the film. Producer Norman Lear, another commentator in Ferro’s documentary Pablo, suggests that this technique rose to popularity because “he believed people could retain information whether written or visual in this machine gun style” (Pablo 21:09). This technique was likely inspired by Ferro’s former job working on commercials.
Most commercials consist of attention grabbing content for only one minute; thus editors must be strategic with their cuts, only show the important bits of information, and convey a story within a short amount of time. A trailer is essentially a commercial for a film; its purpose is to entice individuals to go watch the film. While not all trailers must utilize fast-cutting, many do use this technique to keep viewers engaged in the content. For example, action movies, such as Marvel superhero films, will splice between four to five shots of various characters who might appear in the film all within a few seconds to stimulate excitement among fans and movie-goers about certain actor appearances, while not giving away anymore of the film.
Ferro was ahead of his time for creating such fast-paced works of art. Nowadays, it is a prerequisite for content to be concise and get to the point as fast as possible. The overwhelming amount of content on social media has shifted the way individuals interact with videos. Users’ attention spans have shortened because they know that if a video is uninteresting to them, they have the freedom to scroll to the next video. There is unlimited content to watch. With shorter attention spans, creators are left with only the first few seconds of their video to make an impression and capture their viewer’s next action to stay or scroll on. Ferro’s fast-cutting technique is a testament of his experimentation and willingness to take risks in his work that is now normalized and an important contribution to modern-day technology consumption.
Film editing in the 1960s was a tedious and exacting process. Machines with built-in editing software had not yet been invented, so editors hand-spliced the reel directly from the canister. Paul Bushby, a film editor who grew up in the late 1940s, tells newspaper South Coast Register that “‘this was genuinely a very strenuous and tiring job because those film cans are very heavy.’” He goes on to mention that “paper cuts were also a guarantee” as “the edge of the film was extremely sharp.” At the time, editors wore “brass scissors around their necks, as those were the only type of scissors that could be used to cut the physical film”; steel scissors left “unpleasant audio spikes” (South Coast Register). For Ferro, editing his effects proved to be difficult. Creating the fast-paced “machine-gun style” cuts meant splicing each frame of film and rearranging it in the desired way. Allen, Ferro’s son, explains that by watching his father work, he learned that within a 24 frames per second timeline, “you could lengthen the scene” by holding frames; “there’s all kinds of trickery to create an illusion,” and “that’s really what [Ferro] specialized in” (Art of the Title par. 25). If a film editor does not understand the layout of a timeline, she cannot do anything efficiently. In the fast-cutting sequence technique, Ferro created an illusion by doing the opposite: holding a word on-screen for just one frame. While a single frame is not much time, the bold, white lettering of the word was eye-catching enough for the viewer to see it.
Similarly, the split screen technique created an illusion. It required the film to be arranged only on certain parts of the screen. To do this, Ferro made “male and female mattes,” to differentiate between which video would go behind which matte, and then after shooting, the film would go behind its respective matte and adjust the picture until it appeared in the mold (Pablo 52:40-52:52). One mistake and he had to start over. When finished, it looked as though five to six different films were playing on just one screen, but surprisingly, the final result was not confusing. Ferro selectively chose the videos and arranged them so the audience could keep up with the story — it became necessary to view the various moving parts at the same time because they all added up when viewed together. This technique, still new to Ferro, required experimentation, patience, and trust in the process.
Creating title sequences requires unique skill and imagination because the artist is not starting from scratch: the film has been already created and the title sequence is only a supplementary part of that work. The title sequence artist must work with the director to decide how much of the film’s fictional or non-fictional world they want to introduce within the title sequence. Throughout his career, Pablo Ferro invented and popularized handwritten typography, split screens, and fast-cutting techniques in order to bring his vision of the film to life in the relatively short two to four minutes of time allotted for title sequences. Consequently, his techniques informed the audience of the film's main character(s), genre, and imminent themes. At the time, Ferro’s work heavily impacted the film industry’s innovation on the silver screen. And yet, decades later, his work continues to have a lasting impact, now on modern communications technology such as social media; creators continue to employ Ferro’s techniques to edit their videos today. Handwritten typography is utilized to achieve a playful aesthetic, split screens are employed to create conversation amongst two clips, and fast-cut editing has been a vital part of capturing and keeping users’ attention on a video. These specific techniques have the powerful effect of evoking certain emotions or awakening certain memories within the viewer, which then alters how each person might consume, experience, and interpret the film or piece of media. What began as technical innovations for title sequence art in film and TV are now essential elements of storytelling and communications for a much broader range of industries.
A video supplement (created by me, Shiva) that encompasses a visual description of the editing techniques mentioned in this essay: vimeo.com/shivadiva/behindthetitle.
Works Cited
A Clockwork Orange. Directed by Stanley Kubrick, Trailer by Pablo Ferro, Warner Bros., 1972. Dr. Strangelove. Directed by Stanley Kubrick, Main Titles by Pablo Ferro, Columbia Pictures,
1964.
“Editing Video in the 60s.” Eyes Of A Generation...Television's Living History,
