Wednesday, February 6, 2019

The Upmost Importance of Font


Titles are essential to a films overall connection with audiences. The way titles are portrayed help to evoke certain emotions to viewers, such as fear for horror movies or humor for comedies. For the thriller genre specifically, fonts are usually abnormal. Rather than appearing professional like Arial, Times New Roman or Helvetica fonts, titles in thriller films are typically built to create a stronger, immediate sense of fear or suspicion.

To start off, lets first evaluate the very popular Netflix original phycological thriller "Black Mirror". The title for this was deliberately made to appear as if it was cracked from the glass to promote suspense, which directly follows along with the emotions a thriller movie tries to create. Along with that, the show "Black Mirror" uses a customized edition of the Sans Serif font, to show the creepiness of the show. Note the white color as well, and how white gives off a sense of new creations and futuristic technology. Imagine if the font was in Comic Sands, and was hot pink... we would no longer be drawn in by the thrilling and suspicious factors of the title, but we would instead be fooled into thinking it's a chick flick about mirrors! The size of the title is also of importance. It is big enough to read and enough to draw in our suspense, but not too big as to be overwhelming, such as what we may expect from action movies.




 To the right I have the movie poster for the popular 2018 thriller film "A quiet place." Once again, we notice a lack of common professional fonts such as Times New Roman or happy fonts such as Comic Sands, but a new, spookier looking font. It appears sharp and rugged, which helps foreshadow to the audience how there will be a possible fight for survival within the film, building tension without even watching the film. Also, the color scheme of the font is similar to that of "Altered Carbon" with the usage of white which shows a sense of newness, indicating the film has a new and unique environment for the audience to explore, promoting suspense. However, the usage of red in the font color mixture should be noted as well, as red demonstrates violence and points towards the more mysterious and gruesome parts of the film present.  The size is also very similar to that of "Altered Carbon", as it is big enough to read, yet small enough to draw in suspense and has our eyes draw themselves to the picture at hand.
Following these, I decided to analyze the title sequence for the 2013 thriller film "Limitless". Within it, I noticed that the information in the titles included the cast/crew names and the roles they played. For example, I could use this information in my project through crediting my partners for their work by putting "Editor - Ben Isaacs" in my title sequence. Another thing I noticed was that the credits were not placed perfectly center frame but instead were put more towards the bottom of the frame. This is done to ensure the audience can focus on the images and action portrayed on screen rather than them being distracted by the fonts. It will be important to ensure my titles are around the edges and not center framed when making my own title sequence. It was also evident that the titles for the roles each person took on was smaller than the name of said person. For example, in my project, we could say "Production Designer - Bianca Raby". (Preferably written horizontally and not vertical, of course). 




My sources:












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