Any Human Heart
Any Human Heart
"Never say you know the last word about any human heart." - Henry James
Huge Designs' opening title sequence for the UK's Channel 4 television adaptation of William Boyd's novel Any Human Heart casts widening threads of light and shadow to frame an Everyman's journey through infinite sadness and celebrity.
Paul McDonnell at Huge Designs:
"We were initially briefed by the director Michael Samuels. They were looking for a title sequence that would encapsulate the journey of one man from birth to grave in 40 seconds but without being too literal. One thing we had to keep in mind was the fact that our character couldn't be recognised as any of the three actors who played Logan Mountstuart in different stages of his life. Hence having the stylized silhouette of a man seemed to be the perfect solution
The execution of the animation itself mainly took place on our studio rooftop. We filmed myself performing the various sequences. These were then rotoscoped and then stitched together. A few of the sequences described are his birth, rise to literary fame, traveling to the city, his time in the gallery, and finally his death. Finally the sequence went off to the composer Dan Jones who put the icing on the cake with his evocative music."
Storyboards 1 (Click to Enlarge)
Storyboards 2 (Click to Enlarge)
Artwork stills (Click to Enlarge)
Quantum of Solace
"It's time to get out." - James Bond
What stifles creativity? Tedious third party rudeness, fear of appearing the fool, fear of failure (stigmatizing mistakes), fear of authority, fear of bucking the team or the trend?
MK12, the title and motion graphic designers for director Marc Forster's 2008 entry in the James Bond franchise, Quantum of Solace, englobes 007 with women in the dunes and the persistence of arid visions; a zoetrope in free fall and sandy contrails of a bullet on its way. Taking the title design reins from names like Binder, Brownjohn, and Kleinman, MK12 - billing itself as a "full-service lateral hyperthreaded tactical design and research bureau" - seems to have attained a self-fulfilling creative kinship that flies in the face of what author Bruce Sterling describes as the flux of "Hollywood film ad-hocracies."
To make a movie, Sterling says:
You're pitchforking a bunch of freelancers together, exposing some film, using the movie as the billboard to sell the ancillary rights, and after the thing gets slotted to video, everybody just vanishes.
To take the idea further, Joel Kotkin, author of a landmark 1995 article in Inc. magazine entitled, "Why Every Business Will Be Like Show Business," writes:
Hollywood has mutated from an industry of classic huge, vertically integrated corporations into the world's best example of a network economy. Eventually, every knowledge-intensive industry will end up in the same flattened, atomized state. Hollywood just has gotten there first.
Ben Radatz, MK12 creative director is part of something different:
The studio as an entity is definitely greater than the sum of its parts. It's casual, because everyone is unpretentious, anti-hierarchical and open-minded. Yet it's also personal, because I believe most of us are introverts. And more importantly, we are all friends first.
So MK12 is a collective that capitalizes on true collaborative creativity realized (or not) by and with the hands of friends. Why is this alternative not the well-practiced norm from the damn beginning? What progressive, Vandermeerish planes of warped Gothicism would we be exploring? Even as we take solace in the knowledge that we will have a crack at it in this lifetime, the underbelly's nibblet tugs are ever-feeding with the awareness that we might've been there sooner.
Days of Heaven
"You know how people are. You tell 'em somethin', they start talkin'." - Linda
Firing a mix of critical thought and mesmerizing immersion, Dan Perri's title design for Terrence Malick's Days of Heaven combines street level photojournalism and credit-to-character inferences drawing the curious eye at will, the ears aswoon with "Carnival of the Animals - The Aquarium" by Camille Saint-Saens. You are nowhere if not here, with these people, in the Gilded Age of American history.
From Cinema Sights:
And then the last shot of the [opening title sequence] subtlety shifts us from photos [and] into the world of the film. In a masterful move, the [last] shot perfectly replicates the same look of the previous images, but...it is one of the actors, Linda Manz (in a photograph taken by Edie Baskin.) It's through her perspective that we will take this journey so it is fitting that she is the one who bridges the gap from the [opening] credits into the first shot of the film.
Commentary excerpts from the 2007 Criterion Collection DVD:
Dianne Crittenden, Casting Director: "Terry...has a vision that I'm not sure everyone else who is working with him sees [but] he sees it and he gets it."
Billy Weber, Editor: "We used to get complaints...that the music at the opening of the picture, which is by Camille Saint-Saens, was not by Ennio Morricone who composed the music for the movie."
Patricia Norris, Costume Design: "I've never seen the pictures used at the front of the movie. They are different periods though, if you really want to be analytical about it [however this is more about] a feeling you want to capture; right or wrong it's [about] this feeling of poverty and hard life."
