helpful hint

you may need to click on the dates on the side menu i.e november/ december to view all of my artists/designers.

websites

timburtoncollective.com/multimedia.html

youtube.com/watch?v=i8-kmjbqkw

2.foxsearchlight.com/napoleondynamite/

Tom Gauld

I love the layout style Gauld uses in his comics/graphic novels, and the way images mirror each other with only minor differences. His use of layout really makes his storys flow well and I love his use of line as you get a feel of real texture and movement.

Saul Bass

Bass is regarded and I have formed the opinion that he is and was the designer who revolutionized the design of film title sequences, beginning with Otto Preminger's Carmen Jones. He pioneered the use of animation techniques to achieve a range of psychological and emotional effects unobtainable with straight type. when Saul Bass collaborated with Otto Preminge for his controversial movie A Man With A Golden Arm Preminger wanted his audience to see the movie titles as an intergrated part of the film and it was Bass's job to do exactly that. Bass's titles featured an animated black paper-cut-out of a heroin addicts arm, knowing its powerful effect and portrail of addiction.

The titles for that movie siginfied the reinvention of the movie title as an art form.

Bass has really stood out to me from the list of artist/designers that I have explored as his work seems to be a mile stone/turning point in the new emerging industry of title sequence design. He has been an influential designer to many of the designers I have studied, some have become his succesor in the production of the title sequence. which are movies within the,selves and yet are perfectly linked to there content. He used new innovative designs and techniques whihc gave him that edge amongst the film title industry. Bass was an unknow name to me until Idiscovered that I had heard of or actually seem some of his works and have grown a real interest into this area of design.

Jared Hess

I love the title sequence to napoleon dynamite, the simple use of alphabet soup/ letters is really effective and perfectly merges with the movie and its content.

Pablo Ferro

Pablo Farro is seen as Saul Bass's sucsessor and is most famous for his opening credits to Kubrick's Dr. Strangelove. Ferro is also mistaken for the productuion of the bizarre title sequence for Napoleon Dynamite in which the credits are written in food.

The young Ferro expanded his interest in the cinema working as an usher in a 42nd Street theater that screened foreign films. Working with STAN LEE (the future editor of Marvel Comics) as a penciller he produced a series of adventure stories before moving into animation. He trained with Disneys William Tytal and learned well, From the revolutionary split-screen montage of the original The Thomas Crown Affair,to the opening sequence from To Die For and beyond, Ferro put his indelible stamp on the living image and increasing world of title sequence design. Ferro's distinctive hand-drawn opening segments have appeared in films ranging from Stop Making Sense, American Heart, and the Addams Family to Men in Black and gave him that cutting edge individual look.

Stanley Spencer

Spencer is an artist I am familiar with, he creates paintings which tell narratives very well and are often religious or painted in churches as frescos. His painting style does not appeal to me and I find it hard to appreciate his work. I do however agree that his works have great narratives within them, as well as allowing the viewer to form their own narrative and view from what they see.

Kyle Cooper

Cooper is also acclaimed as the most innovative and important designer of film titles since Saul Bass. He is most known for his creation of the title sequence for the horror thriller SEVEN, credited as bringing about a renaissance in innovative film title design. The titles to SEVEN are short films in their own right not just design solutions but metaphorical representations of the whole film. SEVENS title sequences is highly stylized, the letters are hand scratched by Cooper onto film stock frame by frame. The sequence captured the mind of the movies serial killer and set the tone for the entire film. Its a unique blend of auteur and creative genius that makes the sequence memorable, but doesnt over shadow the movie it becomes a part of it.

The New York Times summed up the Cooper effect: "The opening and closing credits asr so good, they're almost worth sitting through the film for."

Copper counts Saul Bass's work, along with Stephen Frankfurt's lead in for To Kill A Mockinbird, as his greatest influences.

Cooper the man described as the next Saul Bass, also has that edge which has captured my attention. Againg the name was nit familiar to me however is work definitly was, I find his work links extremly well to its content just as Bass's does. The mini movies- title sequences give you that glimps of what the movie entails or the effects it might bring upon you. That ability to link the titles with the actual movie is something Cooper does extremly well, so well infact many Hollywood producers refuse to work with him due to the fat that his titles might upstage the actual movie itself.Typography is another particular area of his work which I reaaly like, as it too completly reflects and ties in with the movie wether it be its shape, tone or the context within which it is placed. Again I will persue a great interest in the work he produeces and has produced.

Jeff Wall

Wall is an artist that I am very unfamiliar with and after viewing his work have found that it does not appeal to me or intrigue me in any way.

Edward Hopper

Hopper is a trained illustrator, who spent five years studying painting under Robert Henri of the Ashcan School of painters who focused on the gritty realitiesof the city. The school influenced his style though he tended to depictthe sense of urban isolation not chaos. Nighthawks was inspired by a restaurant in New York, its composition is carefully constructed but lacks narrative, it has a timeless quality which transcends any particular location. The three customers in the painting seem lost in their own thoughts and seem as remote from the viewer as they are from one another. Hopper denise that he purposely infused any of his painting with symbols of isolation and emptiness but later acknowledged that, "unconsciously, he probably did paint the loneliness of the large city. Hoppers paintings transcend illustration and resist simple narrative interpretation.

Hopper uses narrative in a strange way within his work, his work is usually comprised of carefully constructed composition and lacks real narrative, at leat any direct narrative as he wants the viewer to place their own narratives within his paintings or imagine their own interpretations of what they think he is trying to portray.

Gregory Crewdson

Crewdson likes to use themes of anxiety, loneliness, mystery and seperation, all played out in areas of jarring domestic banality. In his huge digital chromogeric prints produced from 8 by 10 inc negatives, lies warped psychological world of strange figures, unsettling symbols and improbable collisions of the ordinary and weird. There is little in his pictures that makes sense and nothing is explained. His photographs allow the viewer to always bring their own story to them.

Crewdson tells narratives in a completly different approach to the other artist/designers that I have studied. he too produces narratives throught a lense and yet his approach is done in a completly different manor to Sherman. His images look like stills from actual movie sets, he unlike Sherman is never present within his works which are produced on a grand scale. Little makes sense within his work I think that it what makes it so appealing as it allows you to make up your own narrative or judgement of what you think it is he is trying to convey.

Tim Burton

I really love Tim Burtons style of drawing his use of simple lines and colour, and the texture given to the images by the use of line gives you a real feel of movement.

Burton is another favourite artist, illustrator, movie maker and animator of mine, in particular I love Burtons affection for stop motion model animation and the narratives he creates for his characters within the weired and wonderful worlds he creates for them. Burton gets inside the minds of his characters and creates their past, present, and futures, as well as the worlds which they will be placed within.

Stephen Frankfurt

I must say that Frankfurts title sequence for the movie To Kill A Mockingbird is one of, if not my favourite title sequence. I love the use of objects within the title all of which are linked to the movie and its characters. The titles link perfectly to the movie and are intrigeing to watch, the objects, movement, sound and typography are all key to making the piece work they way it does. They allow your mind to be overrun with ideas and images of what lies ahead. They are so simple and yet so powerful that they to me could almost be the most memorable if not interesting part of the movie.

Cindy Sherman

Sherman was established on the basis of her untitled film stills, a series of black and white photographs, in which the artist depicts herself dressed in the gulses of cliched b movie heroines. Sherman has a quality which allows her to be present in her work, and yet never really be there. Her appropriation of the space on both sides of the lens destabilized the traditionally gendered opposition between artist and model, object or subject.

During the 80's Sherman began to use colour film, to exhibit very large prints, and concentrate more on lighting and facial expression. prosthetic appendages and liberal amounts of make-up moved ner work into the grotesque and the sinister.

Sherman is another photographer who portrays a narrative through a lense, however I find her work to be some what strange and I do not quite understand what it is she is trying to convey.

Chris Ware

Ware demonstrates that the language and pictographs in cheap comical chapbooklets can evolve into fine art, if the author maintains enough courage to eliminate everything unnecessary. Crosshatching is replaced with solid blocks of colour designed to elicit a specific emotional response. Perspective can be abandoned in favour of flattened, foreshortened orthographic angles of view. Jimmy Corrigan, curious Quimby the Mouse and associates are rendered simply by hand with precision. His comics and illustrations depict anger, isolation, guilt and more.

He regards Charles Schulz and Frank King as majour influences upon his work.

Ware is an illustrator who completly re-designed the form and function of a comic, he uses complex structures, colours and symbols to create a comic in an innovative way using the same principals but lays the narratives out within a technical yet understandable structure. Within his work wether it be a colour or an image something links the pieces together and I have found his work to be very influential upon my own and for future reference.

Art Spiegelman

Spiegelmans narrative MAUS portrays jews as mice and nazis as cats, his work is not just meant to be plainly understood but present you with images once unimaginable. His work is best known for its shifting graphic style and formal complexity, and controversial content. Spiegelman believes the medium of comics should not be ignored and in our post-literature culture the importance of comics is on the rise, for"comics echo the way the brain works."