Monday 13 December 2010

Art of the Title

Dirty Harry contact sheet

If we are going to make an opening based around a thriller/crime genre it would be best to look at similar film openings, this opening is of Dirty Harry a 1971 crime thriller starting Clint Eastwood.

This is a good opening to link to as we decided to have a police officer looking at a crime on a roof, and in Dirty Harry its similar.
This sequence is slow paced and shows a man aiming a rifle at a woman in a swimming pool across two buildings. The music is very eerie, but goes well under the circumstances, as he them shoots the women. Then the scene changes to Inspector Harry Callahan walking up some stairs and inspecting the scene, he then notices the building where the shooter could possibly be, he then walks around that roof top of the other building (during this the camera tracks and pans around showing us all of San Francisco), all while this is happening the credits are being shown to us in simple yellow and black writing.
The music in this scene is very effective as it represents the two characters very well, the eerie music is playing while we see the shooter, and then the cool-calm music is playing when we see Clint Eastwood, whose character is cool and calm for most of the movie.
We could use this technique in our sequence, when showing the inspector we could play either calm music, heroic music, or empathising music, and a creepy dangerous score when showing the villain.

During this sequence the credits appear in this order;


• Warner Bros, a Kinney Company
• Clint Eastwood
• In a Malpaso Company Production
• Dirty Harry
• Co-Starring Harry Guardino Reni Santoi
• Andy Robinson John Larch
• Featuring John Mitchum Lyn Edgington Mae Mercer Ruth Kobart Woodrow Parfrey
• Josef Sommer Maurice S. Argent William Paterson Jo De Winter James Nolan Graig G. Kelly
• And John Vernon as “The Mayor”
• Director of Photography Bruce Surtees
• Art Direction Dale Hennesy Film Editor Carl Pingitore Sound By William Randall Set Decorator Robert DeVestel
• Assistant to the Producer George Fargo Unit Production Manager Jim Henderling Dialogue Supervisor Scott Hale Make Up Supervisor Gordon Bau S.M.A Supervising Hair Stylist Jean Burt Reily C.H.S
• Assistant Director Robert Rubin Wardrobe Glenn Wright
• Filmed In Panavision Technicolor
• Music Lalo Schifrin
• Associate Producer Carl Pingitore
• Executive Producer Robert Daley
• Screenplay by Harry Julian Fink & R.M. Fink and Dean Riesner Story by Harry Julian Fink & R.M. Fink
• Produced and Directed by Don Siegel

As we have a much smaller production team, we will not use as many titles like this one, but we will include the main ones, like the comapany, production, film title, actors and actresses, writers, music, and the director.

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