Movie Titles Project – Typography & Design

For this project you will be adding an opening title and credit sequence to the introduction scene of American Psycho (2000). You will be adding your text using Premiere Pro. You have to make sure that the type you are using matches with the aesthetic of the movie. (You don’t want to use Comic Sans in this serial killer movie).

You will be graded on

design brief (10%)
appropriate type selection (50%)
use of color (20%)
placement (20%)

You’ll turn in your project in a folder you set up (name it “Movie Title YourLastName” and put it in the Movie Titles Sequence folder in Google Drive.

Your design brief should be a one-page memo in Google Docs that describes

the emotional content of the movie (and, therefore, titles)
title sequences or trailers for three similar movies with an analysis of their titles or use of text (including the category of font based on Lupton)
Three possible fonts (including why you selected them)

Because the lab license doesn’t include Adobe fonts (beyond the ones already installed in the CEC), you’ll have to find open source fonts to use. Fonts.google.com has a pretty extensive collection that you can search by category (as well as other characteristics). Be sure to put a copy of the font files in your project folder on Google Drive, both so I can install a copy when I view your project and so that you can re-install it on lab computers if you move to a new computer.

Name your file “Movie Title Design Brief YourLastName”.

Here is some of the info you can use in the titles (in addition to the name of the movie). You don’t have to use all of this info and you don’t have to use it in this order. Watch titles to some other movies to see how this info is handled different in different movies. When you finish the project, you should be able to tell me why you put things where/when they are.

Director: Mary Harron

Writers: Bret Easton Ellis, Mary Harron, Guinevere Turner

Executive Producer: Joseph Drake

Christian Bale

Justin Theroux

Josh Lucas

Bill Sage

Jared Leto

Willem Dafoe

Here are some examples of well-done titles for discussion.

Art of the Title (good discussion as well).

Goodfellas