Series Openings - Use of Freeze-Frame

Powerpuff Girls

At the start of the opening, just the silhouette of Professor Utonium is shown on a colored background with only certain smaller details in other bright colors being animated, which makes them stand out. The fact that the silhouette is frozen makes the animated part stand out even more, without any distraction from other movement. A lot of different parts of this opening has stationary images and scenes, making it feel almost comic book like. I think this is a good technique for showing action, or that action is about to happen as that is what is usually associated with comic books. In fact, this is used for most of the first 30 seconds, giving you to get used to the character designs and focus on what the narrator is actually telling you about the story. As the camera pans around the villain characters, they are frozen to, so that your eyes just follow the camera don't get distracted.




Snatch

Though Snatch is not an animated title sequence or even series, I do like their way of introducing characters. Again, they freeze on each character as in introduction, but they desaturate the character for the duration of it, instead putting a plain colored background behind them and the name of the character. This gives you time to get used to their face and appearance without any distraction, especially as the background colors are quite plain and toned down. The text gives you a name to put to the face so that it's easier to keep up with characters from the start of the film. I do think that some of the introductions could have been on for longer as you don't get much time for it to sink in, but I do think that it is a good strategy and uses a lot of the other introductory techniques mentioned in some of my other blog posts.



 RocknRolla

Again, RocknRolla isn't an animated sequence but I do like the way it concentrates on character, who stand out even more because of the simple colors. The yellowish tone of the video reminds me almost of paper, making the black feel like ink. This is helped by the kind of purplish and red qualities in some of the black backgrounds.The difference in detail and contrast between the characters and backgrounds also give it an almost collage sort of feel, and that allows for more layers and more different images to be put in the background without taking away from the main subjects (the characters). I think that this probably does work better with a more realistic or live action kind of style, but could definitely be interesting to experiment with in an animated only video.