Where and Why Did You Place Your Titles? - Planning/Evaluation

Title Name:

REFLECTION - The title of this film started off as a working title, as we were calling it that due to the murder scene being associated with a mirror and the killer's reflection. After a while, we thought that it would be appropriate to call the actual film Reflection as well, because the entire story would be based around the main murder, and the film would also reflect the views of a common day society and show people that sexism, racism and sexual abuse is still a part of our society even in 2010.

Title Font:

After using many different fonts to see which seem to look best, we had it come down to two:

Pussycat:

The interesting aesthetic of this font attracted our attention and we then liked how certain letters were always lower case, but when capitalised, were just in a slightly different font. We used this font initially as we felt that it would mirror the story of the film, as although two things may actually look the same, they were slightly different, but it would take someone with a keen eye to discover the differences. This font was used throughout the development of the project, but towards the end, we felt that there were certain letters that seemed indistinctive or just ugly, so we decided to use another font.

Mesquite Standard:

This font had a slightly different effect, as all the letters were capitalised. This lack of lower case made everything seem bigger and more outstanding than that of the "pussycat" font. This made the titles have more of a strong impact, which we felt made a big difference, so we switched to this for our final version.

Title Position:

All but 2 of our titles are positioned on the screen in exactly the same way; the top of the letters starting just above two thirds of the way up the screen. The reason for this is that people are said to may more attention to something that is in that area of the screen than to something that is dead in the centre. the stated reason for this is that as people, we often look for horizons to find distance, which is often found 2/3 up from our line of site. (source - wikipedia)

The 2 that we decided not to have in this position were the names of the actors. The reason for this was twofold, one is that we felt that their names should stand out and be different from the other titles' placement, and two, that it would look good if it faded from one name in the top left and the next name in the bottom right:

Title Placement:

We have placed our titles throughout the sequence so that the longest time between any two titles is 20 seconds, and this long gap only happens twice, other than that there is only about 5 seconds between each title. We have done this to ensure that we can place as many titles as possible without interrupting the narrative. This was very important, as a strong narrative is needed in almost any thriller, but a 'Whodunit' needs to have a very strong base, in order to build up the potential suspects. This spacing also allowed for the non-diegetic music to build up the suspense and tension whilst the visuals were limited by the black background. This building of tension is key, and it is very important that the placement of titles doesn't effect it, therefore, if they come too often, they will undoubtable ruin the sequence, but if they are too spread out, then not enough information about the film is revealed, making it a poor title sequence.