Live Action Series Openings

Even though I am making an animated title sequence, I have picked out a few of my favorite live action title sequences to see what sort of things they include, how the get a message across if any and what sort of introduction their characters have.

Teen Wolf



Teen Wolf's opening sticks to a minimum of colors, using mostly light and desaturated clips to get its point across. Certain characters are depicted different amounts of times, depending on what different plot lines they are involved in or the center of, meaning that the openings change slightly with every season. It uses a lot of symbolism and cryptic clues  about the show, things that you aren't likely to pick up on until after watching the show (i.e the importance of the tree/roots, the direction certain characters are moving in and why). In some cases, the opening is foreshadowing events to come in the series, and I think that's appreciated more the more episodes that are watched. Even though I love this approach to opening credits, I am not sure how well it would work out for my project - since I am only making an opening and not a series to go along with it, I think that things should be at least a bit more obvious and make sense to the casual viewer, whether they would be intending on watching the show afterwards or not.


Sleepy Hollow

Sleepy Hollow is again mostly desaturated, but concentrates a lot more on silhouettes and showing full scenes from a distance, rather than concentrating on characters. Backgrounds are used a lot more both for framing - especially with the tree silhouettes - and to give you a sense of where the show is set. Characters are shown with less symbolism, but you get a larger sense of what their role is in the show and how they act, which is a much stronger introduction; where Teen Wolf's opening makes a lot more sense when you are already familiar with the show and characters, Sleepy Hollow's explains a lot more, and is very welcome to new viewers. One of the differences between the two openings is that TW's is for season 2, with season 1 not having any opening and SH's is for their first and only season, which is why they need a much larger introduction.

Grimm



The opening of Grimm uses a lot of shotframing to show two sides of the narrative at once, with both the supernatural and the normal side of the characters' lives. The colors used are mostly to set the scenes apart in my opinion, as they don't seem to corelate that much the the characters being shown at the time. They do appear for the more energetic and dangerous scenes though, making them stand out more than the normal scenes. This helps to make the show seem much more excited and to put emphasis on the action that viewers will be expecting. To split the screen apart, they use a teared line, which is used to make both sides seem more like pages from a book, which is a very important symbol throughout the show and is the key object that actually gets a lot of the plot points moving.


Musketeers

The opening for BBC's Musketeers (2014) uses lots of inks and silhouettes. The black ink runs over the page, creating a silhouette of the character/scene concentrated on in that particular shot, and then as detail is overlaid and different inks and special effects are laid over the background, the characters etc quickly become clearer. This not only puts emphasis on the surrounds of the character, showing hints to when/where the show is set with maps and calligraphy that you would associate with older times, but also gives you an order of things to look at. I really like how the backgrounds are made up of different colored inks and different amounts of live action footage and not; it helps to show their ever changing surroundings as they go on different adventures and achieve different things. I think that it also helps to but emphasis on the differences between characters, and the kinds of things that their character arcs revolve around, whether it is being the center of power, a romantic plot or violence.

All of these shows contain a lot of action and violence, which is something that you often see in superhero shows, though usually to a lesser extent. I think that I can take some of these ideas, like silhouettes and framing to show more about my characters and their backgrounds without having to explain it all out, and make it easier for the casual viewer to understand.