The Title Sequences of Saul Bass

The title sequences of Saul Bass
The opening credits can be the most important moment in a film. Other than trailers and marketing campaigns, they are the first images the audience sees when the lights go down. Saul Bass was the industry's pioneer, a graphic artist in the film industry he said, "making a main-title was like making a poster—you're condensing the event into this one concept, this one metaphor…a back-story that needs to be told or a character that needs to be introduced.”
During his 40-year career he worked for some of Hollywood's greatest filmmakers, including Alfred Hitchcock, Otto Preminger, Martin Scoreses & Stanley Kubrick.
I looked at the title sequence of Hitchcock’s Psycho. Hitchcock wanted the sequence to look like a major feature film. To accomplish this goal, Saul Bass created one of his most prestigious title sequences. The graphic motifs that Bass suggested were nervous, horizontal and vertical bars that expanded and contracted in mirror-image patterns. To me they suggested prison bars or crashing gates. The title sequence was haunting and suggested the something bad was going to happen in the film. The movements of the bars symbolized the psychotic schizophrenia of the main character.
My initial thoughts were that title sequences can set the mood of the film's story, to express the story in some metaphorical way. I saw the title as a way of conditioning the audience, so that when the film actually began, viewers would already have an emotional resonance with it. A title sequence should catch the whole essence of the film, and in itself be a short movie. Saul Bass does this in all of his title sequences. His title sequences show an acute attention to pace, rhythm and detail. As his is a graphic designer he has mastered the graphic compositions in movement and switched his expertise from graphic to animation.
With new technology emerging there is a need for graphic designers to be able to put their existing skills to motion graphics.