The Credits and Title

The titles for my film opening are actually unconventional for my genre and, actually, most film openings. Generally the titles come quite early on in the opening sequence immediately following the credits. However I decided to have my credits at the start, in keeping with genre conventions, but I wanted the actual name of my film to come right at the end after the close-up on my protagonist's face and her scream as this creates a bigger impact. Therefore I made a conscious decision to break this general convention as I believe having the title at the end of the opening sequence is more effective and therefore more beneficial for my film opening.

For the credits I took inspiration from other films in the crime thriller genre. The font used is almost always sans-serif, this is clear in 'Gone Girl', 'Fargo', 'The Bourne Identity', 'Zodiac' and 'Se7en'. I continued this in my credits, using sans-serif, capitalised text as I though this made it look more official and clinical which is what I wanted to achieve as, for the very first scene, the characters are in a cold, sterile environment which the audience later discover to be a police station.
I liked the opening credits from 'Fargo' so modelled my own on those, their text is also capitalised, it's simple and each name fades in and out which adds to the melancholy feel created by the music. I really like this and, as the mood I want to create is similar, I used a similar style of text.

For my final title I have been struggling to find a font that I really like. I have finally found a couple, documented in an earlier blog post, which I'm happy with. I had a very specific font idea in my head which I think is why it's been so difficult to find something that matches. I definitely wanted sans-serif as this is in-keeping with the genre conventions and feels official and clinical which links to how the film is about a police investigation. However, I needed something to be wrong with it, not a perfect font, either pieces of the letters missing or having slightly differently shaped or sized letters. This is to reflect how something is wrong, something's not how it seems. It took me a while to find anything that ticked all these boxes.
When it comes to the animation of the titles, I want my letters or even the parts of the letters to come together, slowly revealing the title. This connotes how the film is about the different parts of the investigation coming together to reveal the culprit of the murders. I really like the animation of the title sequence from 'Stranger Things', this is a similar idea to what I'd imagined with the letters coming together slowly to form the title but we also get close-ups of each letter moving in and a gradual zoom out as the letters move together at the end. This is incredibly effective in this title sequence and I really love it however, if I was to do something similar I think it would have to be more fast paced to maintain the tension and feeling of threat just created by the scream. It would also have to keep pace with my relatively quick drum beat which is carried over from the third flashback.