Research on film openings

For my brief, i decided to go with brief 3 as i think this will overall be the most suited idea to me. For homework - we were asked to do research on a non-US and a US film, and analyse the titles, count how many there are and also what order they're in. We were also asked to analyse the number of shots and the duration of the opening titles in terms of genre.

My first idea of brief 3 is the non US film 'Lemony Snickets 'A series of unfortunate events' which fits the idea of brief 3, and the idea of a young protagonist, but has three main characters instead. the credits are at the end, which im not sure is the same? However, i enjoyed the title seqeuence regardless and thought it would be useful to put it onto my blog. The film was made in the UK, and the title sequences were created due to the work of Jamie Caliri. I enjoyed the use of animation in the title sequence and it looked as if there had been a tremendous amount of effort put into it.

There was a title scene at both the end and the start of 'Lemony Snicket A series of unfortunate events' and i thought it would be interesting to analyse both title sequences. At the start of Lemony Snicket, we start with the production company:

Paramount Pictures
And Dreamworks Pictures present
The Littlest Elf

We then see there is some commentary, which is fairly unusual in the opening sequence of a film. We then realize that 'The Littlest Elf' is not what dreamworks and paramount are presenting. There are no more titles after this, so we assume the titles are either at the end or appear later in the film. We then see the title sequence is at the end of the film.

The list of titles (in order) we get are:

'Directed by Brad Silberling'
'Screenplay by Robert Gordon'
'Based on the books "The bad beginning" "The Reptile room" and "The Wide Window" by Lemony Snicket.'
'Produced by Laurie Macdonald and Walter F. Parkes.'
'Produced by Jim Van Wyck.'
'Executive Producer Scott Rudin'
'Executive Producer Barry Sonenfeld'
'Executive Producers Julia Pistor and Albie Hecht'
'Director of Photography Emmanuel Lubezki'
'Production Designer Rick Heinrichs'
'Edited by Michael Kahn'
'Costumes designed by Colleen Atwood'
'Music by Thomas Newman'
'Co-producers Minor childers Scott Aversano'
'Associate Producer Linda Hill'
'Visual Effects Supervisor Steven Fangmeier'
'Visual Effects Producer Tom Peitzman'
'Jim Carrey'
'Lemony Snicket's A Series Of Unfortunate Events'
'Liam Aiken'
'Emily Browning'
'Timothy Spall'
'Catherine O'Hara'
'Billy Conelly'
'Cedric the Entertainer'
'Luis Guzman'
'Jennifer Coolidge'
'Craig Ferguson'
'Jane Adams'
'Jamie Harris'
'Merryl Streep'
'Kara Hoffman'
'Shelby Hoffman'
'Jude Law as the voice of Lemony Snicket'
'Casting by Avy Kaufman C.S.A'
'A Parkes/Macdonald Production'
'A Nikolodeon Movies Production'
'A Brad Silberling Film'

There was a huge amount of titles in this sequence, totalling 45! which i think is unnecessary for a title sequence, however this sequence is at the end which is quite confusing. 45 is quite a substantial number of titles and i think my research on Napoleon Dynamite shows that there are a considerably less amount of titles in that opening sequence, which is better to have a lesser amount. I think around 20 titles in the opening sequence is the correct amount of titles to have so i think an opening sequence should not really have a lot of titles as it only introduces the film. The clip was 4 minutes 23 seconds long, which in my opinion is a bit of a long time for only an opening sequence.

These were all the titles on the actual sequence, it then went on the end titles as i said the titles were at the end of the film, and there were about 100 end titles so i did not think it was necessary to write all of them down, the above titles i think were the main ones and the first ones, before you get the scrolling down of text at the end of a film. We were also asked to count the number of shots in the opening sequence but i think that sequence is done just as one long tracking shot. Overall i liked the animation and the amount of detail and effort put into the titles. They looked very advanced and certainly well thought about by Jamie Caliri.