Dexter Title Sequence - Evalutaion Questions (DYM)

1. Summarise the conventions of title sequences that were most important to this task.

The role of a title sequence is to relay important information on the names of those involved, like actors, directors, producers, sponsors and so on. However, in order to avoid boring the audience the title sequence most show an interesting and engaging piece of film, with the titles being overlaid on the film. Therefore, arguably the biggest task within making a title sequence is finding a suitable spot and time to put titles in the shots. You need to ensure that the title is clearly legible whilst also ensuring that it doesn't take away from the focus of the film.

2. How did the group plan to edit the title sequence (consider timing, industry requirements etc)?

First of all, Audrey and I watched through the film a couple of times and noted suitable windows of opportunity for inserting a title. We then worked through the film putting basic title in, using LiveFont on a Mac. We planned to work on the finer details of the titles after all of them had been inserted but that isn't what we ended up doing. Instead, we worked on them individually as we went along.

3. Explain the creative decisions made by your group.

The creative decisions we had to make were fairly simple. We need to decide on the font, the colour, transitions, timings, positions and texture. We decided on a bold red font with no textures. This is because the Dexter main title is of a similar style. We decided on having transitions as that may detract from the focus of the action in the shots. The positioning and timings of he title were always relative to the action in the shot. We wanted to make sure that the title would stand out, but that it would also not dominate the shot.

4. How does your re-edit compare to the original?

I believe that our re-edit had the basics of what the original had. They both had similar fonts and lacked transitions. However, in the original they didn't care as much about positioning and would instead just placed the title anywhere in the shot. The main difference between our re-edit and the original is that the original had a constant stream of titles, whereas we had about 4 titles all spread out across the sequence. This is partly because we ran out of time, but we also weren't planning to have constant titles appearing and instead planned to have 5 seconds gaps.