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Watch: The Evolution of Title Sequences
THE FILM before THE FILM from ntsdpz on Vimeo.
Title sequences just aren’t what they used to be. Nowadays, if they aren’t entirely absent, opening credits are relegated to the corner of the frame, an afterthought accessory to a film’s first scenes. This video from Nora Thös and Damian Pérez entitled “The Film Before The Film,” examines the history of credit sequences from the first Edison films to the age of pioneering designers like Saul Bass and Maurice Bender, through the advent of AfterEffects in the 1990s. Ironically, with all the more tools now at filmmakers’ disposal, titles have recessed into something of a lost art outside of Bond films and other (relatively) aesthetically high-brow big-budgets. “The Film Before The Film” considers the form not as a bumper, but as a piece of cinematic history.
