JJ Abrams at TED

I am a TED Head. I love the lectures at the TED Conference. What began as a small conference in California has grown to a global community, many million strong, focused on exchanging and spreading ideas. If you have seen some of their lectures, please do so, it’s an eye opening experience.

Anyone who is interested in communicating and getting people to pay attention to ways to build suspense in your audience should watch JJ Abrams’ (creator of Lost, the New Star Trek, Alias and so on) great lecture The Mystery Box at the 2007 TED conference. For writers, film makers, designers or anyone who has to give a presentation his ideas on how to get the audience to want more is defiantly worth checking out.

18 Great Film Studio Logo Openings

Going to the cinema has always been magical for me. Perhaps the Theatre is truly the abode of the divine Dionysus. As a child, my family would take my sisters, assorted friends and myself to this magical celluloid realm. We would get some popcorn and wait impatiently for the film to begin. Eventually, I would start playing a game, I would squint my eyes slowly to mimic the effect of the lights dimming. I would do this over and over, pretending the movie was starting. I still do this, except, now I keep them shut, mostly so I can ignore the annoying pre-show advertisements that plague the cinemas like gum under the seats.

Eventually the lights would actually dim, and (not to sound like a grumpy old man) in my day the curtains would part revealing a large white rectangle where a culture’s dreams, hopes, fears and fantasies were projected at 24 frames a second. But first there were the trailers, often times the best part of the movie going experience, then at the cinematic event horizon, when the film would actually start, you are treated to the film studio and distributors identification spot. I love this, when you see the Twenthy Century Fox logo with it’s brassy fanfare it gives me chills. It is important to note that these often are changed with different musical and coloration or special effects, this helps set the mood for the upcoming film. I’ve noted some of these.

Here is a list of some great film studio logo openings. I know I’ve left a bunch off, let me know what ones you like.

New Line Cinema

I like the use of the cinema logo falling into place with the swelling music.

Paramount Pictures

This is a classic one. I only wish I could find the one for Raiders of the Lost Ark.

Morgan Creek Productions

I’ve always enjoyed the animated curves on this one.

DNA Films

A newer one, and it shows, that it makes great use of modern computer animation. Considering the studio makes horror and intense films it is very fitting.

Marvel Comics

A very exciting one that sets the audience up for a ride. Plus I love designs that harken back to some sort of historical roots. The use of halftone dots, flipping pages and close ups of characters and thought bubbles is fantastic.

Warner Bros. Pictures (matrix variation)

This is one of my favorite versions of a studio logo that aids the style of the film. Compare to the Regular & Looney Tunes variations.

Warner Bros. Pictures Regular version (1997):

Compare the Matrix Version to this and you can see how much more effective it was in stetting the tone of the film than if they would have used this much more prosaic version.

Warner Bros. / Looney Tunes variation

Another great riff on the WB

RKO Radio Pictures (1930′s version)

This is a great logo. So disctinctive and telling. It makes me feel so nostalgic for King Kong, and the Rocky Horror Picture Show, where Dr. Frankenfurther’s monster Rocky climbs up a 35 foot RKO Radio Tower, in heels no less!

Lions Gate Films

I like the Lions Gate Logo because it’s is great to see the Lion’s Gates of Agamemnon’s Palace at Mycenae live again. Plus I like the clock work that is resides behind the magic of film. It is the most colborate of the arts, and the animated logo hints at this fact. That the great and powerful Oz of Hollywood is a big machine behind the curtian. This one is from the horrificly bad Saw franchise, but it does set the tone.

Lions Gate Films

Compare the Saw version to this normal version and you can see how the Saw flavors the movie with dread from the first frame:

MGM
In a list like this you have to include the famous lion!

MTV Films Logo

A very clever use of the astronaut and the imagry of the movie theatre.

Pixar
Whimsy that harken’s back to the dawn of Pixar and the computer animation revolution.

Universal Pictures (1930′s Version)

The older logos, like RCA & Paramount are icons.

Universal Pictures: a contemporary version

This one always seems to get my cinematic juices flowing when I see a Universal film. It’s so classicly Hollywood, using a globe to highlght the universal lanugae of film and the film studios narcissism.

Walt Disney (New Logo)

If any film studio logo opening sums up the ideals of a studio better than this one I can’t think of it. It’s so full of imagination and child like wonder, plus it sells the iconagraphy of the studio like no other. Not only is it an trademark for the company, it’s also ad for the theme parks. It is also an homage to Peter Pan; note the third star to the right in the opening shot and Hook (or is it Jack Sparrow’s) Pirate ship on the river

Twenty Century Fox

I’m saving the best for last, maybe because I was such a fan of Star Wars, this will always be the quissential movie opening for me.

More Faux-Nostalgia

It is very fitting that I saw an article on Boing Boing about a new issue of Steampunk Magazine being released after my last post on the work of Bruce McCall. Nothing says Faux-Nostalgia like Steam Punk; that is the achingly sentimental yearning for a future that never happened. In case you don’t know Steampunk is a genre where modern inventions like computers and the information age happened in the age of Steam, during the height of the Industrial Revolution. Check it out, it’s a really great magazine.

London Rooftops, by Raphael-Lacoste

This is a genre that I have liked, mainly because Victorian London is such a rich place for the modern imagination to play. From Marry Poppins to From Hell the place is a fascinating place. Coal darkened skies cast long shadows on cobble stone streets lit by flickering gaslight. Every twist in the street could lead to a knife wielding barber or into the comforting embrace of  the Dawes, Tomes, Mousely, Grubbs, Fidelity Fiduciary Bank, only Tuppence required as entry.

In my imagination Victorian London is a place of squalor on one side and great wealth and absurd tradition on the other. A place on the cusp of modernity, where aristocrats and plutocrats ruled over squalid slums. Not in excessive greed, more with excessive pomp and a certitude of their own righteousness. A time that seemed the sun would never set on the British Empire, then the trenches, artillery and machine guns of Verdun wiped that world away in one fell swoop. It was a tragic period in many ways, as the immortal works of Dickens and Shaw remind us, the distance between us and then is long enough for a bit of romanticism to flourish. And you can read more of that in Steampunk.

• Steam Punk Magazine Link
• More information on Steampunk Link

Nostalgia for a Future that Never Happened: The Work of Bruce McCall

Bruce McCall says in this hilarious and very interesting TED presentation that Nostalgia is the most utterly useless human emotion. I don’t totally agree but I see the point. Nostalgia if taken to extreme becomes a mild case of depression and self-deception. The past is never as great or as bad as it seems and nor will the future be as wonderful or as terrible as we can imagine. Setting that aside, please check out this amazing lecture, McCall is a very witty and gifted artist.

I am fascinated by McCall’s style of art, it touches on many of my passions, science fiction, mid-century design and art that doesn’t take itself too seriously. It’s a mixture of the low-brow art movement with a dash of Norman Rockwellesque technique.

Here are the descriptions of his made-up but wonderful terms, these are things that designers and science fiction writers can and should use when it is appropriate to their work:

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  Tomorrowland Retro-Futurism: from Wikipedia

  Retro-futurism: Looking back to see how yesterday saw tomorrow… and they are always hilariously wrong. Peeked in the 1930’s. Automotive retro-futurism is a big component of his work, the way the past saw cars looking in the future… fins galore!

• Techno-Archaeology: Digging back and finding past miracles that never happened, usually for good reason, that is they wouldn’t have worked or been a disaster… flying cars.
• Faux-Nostalgia: Achingly sentimental yearning for a time that never happened.
• Hyperbolic Overkill: A way of taking exaggeration to the absolute ultimate limit just for the fun of it.
• Shamelessly Cheap: A joke that has no meaning but is strangely funny in and of itself.
• Urban-Absurdism: Making life in New York (and city life in general) even weirder than it is.

The most important thing that McCall said about this style of art (and literature I assume) is that authenticity adds immeasurably to serious nonsense. That is the world presented in Faux-Nostalgia has to look and feel real. The machinery, characters, general look and world have to breathe. In this vein Alan Moore and the many artists he works with do this better than any one else, to see what I mean check out The League of Extraordinary Gentlemen (though please skip the film). Other things that fall in to this same general category:

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  The world of Bruce McCall

  Check out McCall’s great work, All Meat Looks Like South America Link

• The “new” Tommorowland at the Disney theme parks. Link
• The once defunct and highly under appreciated RPG from Game Designer’s Workshop: Space: 1889 Link
• Bruce McCall’s Website Link