I believe one of the most important parts of a film that normally goes overlooked is the film’s title. On a boring viewpoint on it, a good, memorable name is likely to stick in the audience’s heads potentially leading to repeat viewers. But like I said, that is a boring way to look at film and should be avoided at all costs if you want to have fun. From a more creative view on the matter, the title can be a clever way to introduce what type of film you are watching before you are even watching it. Even a very simplistic example, the film ‘Seven’ (David Fincher, 1995) is about a serial killer who acts out the seven deadly sins in their killings. That makes sense. A title can also hold a thematic theme of the film. The title ‘Imagine Me and You’ (Ol Parker, 2005) not only gives away that it’s a film about a relationship (the ‘me and you’ part) but it’s also someone dreaming of having one with another character (of course the ‘imagine’ part). The fact that it starts off with a wedding already tells the audience that this relationship isn’t going to last as where is the ‘imagine’ part represented?
Film titles are normally kept relatively short in an effort to be memorable, but there are some exceptions to that. For my own film, I wanted it to not be short. Think I Don't Feel At Home In This World Anymore (Macon Blair, 2017) or ‘The Assassination Of Jesse James By The Coward Robert Ford’ (Andrew Dominik, 2007) or even ‘The Adventures Of Buckaroo Banzai Across The 8th Dimension’ (W.D. Richter, 1984) if you are that way inclined. There’s this unconventionality to long titles that make them stick in your head just as long.
So I’ve got the initial idea that I wanted the title of my film to not be one word long. From there I can start making a list of potential names for my film. But I also needed a direction to put aim my brain into. I decided that that direction was going to be the title containing either the main character or side characters name. A la ‘Ballad of Buster Scruggs’ (Coen Brothers, 2018) so not only did I need a title, I also needed a weird name that stands out. Thus, I created this list...
-The Eternal Journey to Find Rattlesnake Jones This one would be great if I was doing a film about a spaghetti western. I could probably think of a better word that ‘Journey’ as that is a moderately overused term.
-Needlessly Long Titles and How to Say Them This one is basically a joke about the idea that I had with naming my own but it’s too ‘on the nose’ to actually functioning as a film title. It also doesn’t have anything to do with what the actual film is about.
-Ant Knuckles: A Guide to Frivolous Stealing This is probably the frontrunner for the film title. It features a weird name which could act as the name of the protagonist. It also plays of the phrase ‘frivolous spending’ which can also create intrigue with the film.
-Not Knowing and Not Caring This is probably not the solution to the problem of what to name my film. This film title would probably work best for a film aimed at the middle aged demographic about getting tired of normal life and doing something crazy to prove they still ‘got it’. Whatever ‘it’ is.
-Rudy Hoffer and His Ever Evaporating Grasp on Reality This is joint first or a close second to almighty ‘Ant Knuckles’. This has got everything I want, weird name (sorry to all the people that are called Rudy Hoffer), check. A brief outline about what the film may be about, also check. The film title being obnoxiously long? Checkmate. I think I could do a better job with the name as it was just named after an asthmatic from the TV show ‘Bobs Burgers’ (Loren Bouchard, 2011-)
Tests - Font
So from the list above I could either use the ‘Ant Knuckles: A Guide to Frivolous Stealing’ or ‘Rudy Hoffer and His Ever Evaporating Grasp on Reality’. Both of these fit the general ballpark of what I wanted to call my film. So even though these might not be the final version of the title, I wanted to keep the momentum going so I started doing some mock ups of how the title could look. From this I could potentially find an aesthetic for my film.
For these mocks, I will be using the ‘Ant Knuckles...’ as the placeholder name to give an idea what it could potentially look like. The first thing I want to look at is sorting out the chosen font and aspect ratio. Fonts in themselves can say a lot. For example, a sans serif font is normally associated with formal writing while comic sans and windings is associated with people that lick their finger while turning the page on their kindle. Due to these subconsciously connections to these different ways of writing letters, I want to work out which best fit with my own project.
These are nine different fonts I tried out which to see if any
Tests - Colour
Font isn't just everything. At the time of writing this I am possibly toying with the idea that I could use these title cards throughout my film possibly as chapters or something. However, that idea is not set in stone but regardless I need to get a good colour theme for my project. So I thought the next thing I should do is start playing around with colour combinations in the same vein that I did with the fonts prior to this. Now for the understatement of the year, there is a lot of colours out there almost an infinite amount. Because I will be picking a colour for the font and the background that means you have to times that infinite amount of colours by two. Finding a starting point would be a good first step. So I had the idea that I was going to use some select colours from albums I like. For these examples, I will be using the font 'documenta' which has