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Much Cooing Ensues
AP
The Duke and Duchess of Cambridge bring Prince George to New Zealand 29
Mickey Rooney, left, was married to film star Ava Gardner for one year.
Mickey Rooney Dies at 93
GIVING CREDIT WHERE CREDIT IS DUE
Obituary Mickey Rooney’s approach to life was simple: “Let’s put on a show!” He spent nine decades doing it, on the big screen, on television, on stage and in his extravagant personal life. Rooney died Sunday at age 93 surrounded by family in his North Hollywood home, police said. A superstar in his youth, Rooney was Hollywood’s top box-office draw in the late 1930s to early 1940s. He followed his stints as the vexing but wholesome Andy Hardy and as Judy Garland’s musical comrade in arms with roles in “National Velvet” and “The Bold and the Brave.” Over a four-decade span, he was nominated for four Academy Awards, and received two special Oscars for film achievements, won an Emmy for his TV movie “Bill” and had a Tony nomination for his Broadway smash “Sugar Babies.” Rooney married eight times, including once to Ava Gardner, and had nine children. He was shooting a movie at the time of his death, “The Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde.” ANTHONY McCARTNEY (AP)
TOP: TRUE DETECTIVE (HBO), BOTTOM: ORANGE IS THE NEW BLACK (NETFLIX)
The fast-forward button is right there. At multiple points during a hard-core TV binge-watch — at least the kind that involves a DVR or streaming video — the binger has the option to scoot past the opening titles and immediately continue consuming episodes. Yet increasingly, especially on cable and emerging programming platforms such as Netflix, opening sequences are becoming clever, visionary and cinematic in scope. What makes the story in an opening title sequence so captivating that we can’t bring ourselves to fast-forward through it, even when we’ve got the producers’ names memorized? Let’s look at four of the most crucial elements in great title sequences and how they work to memorable, unskippable effect in some of today’s best intros, as explained by the people who brought them to life. JEN CHANEY (THE WASHINGTON POST )
TOP: GAME OF THRONES (HBO), BOTTOM: MAD MEN (AMC)
Plotting the Narrative Road Map A strong title sequence tells viewers where the narrative is about to take them — sometimes literally, as in the sequence that opens HBO’s “Game of Thrones.” The weekly journey through the story’s terrain is a nod to the maps that appear in the “A Song of Ice and Fire” books on which the show is based. “We were trying to orient the viewer to what’s going on location-wise,” says Jennifer Sofio Hall, executive producer at Elastic, the studio behind the sequence. The locations on that map vary depending on where an episode’s plot plans to take the viewer, turning the titles into a weekly sneak preview.
Avoiding Title Tropes Increasingly, the creators of title sequences rely on unfamiliar im-
agery to anchor their work. For Netflix’s “Orange Is the New Black,” the Thomas Cobb Group created a sequence that features tightly framed shots of the wide smiles and haunted eyes that belong to women who actually served time. The sequence’s director, founder Thomas Cobb, gave the women three directives: Think of a peaceful place, think of a person who makes you laugh, and think of something you want to forget. “It was a very intense day,” Cobb says.
The Power of an Unforgettable Song “Far From Any Road” — the track by alt-country duo the Handsome Family that accompanies the title of HBO’s “True Detective” — is a song that seeps into your molecules. Elastic paired it with haunting imagery: a 3-D-projected blend of stars
Matthew McConaughey and Woody Harrelson with shots of Louisiana country and strippers’ backsides. It earned the top honor for excellence in title design at this year’s South by Southwest Film Festival.
Iconic Imagery As Imaginary Forces managing partner and creative director Peter Frankfurt explains, AMC’s “Mad Men” creator Matthew Weiner envisioned an opening with a live-action Don Draper, who travels to his office only to jump out the window. Frankfurt’s team turned that idea into a motion graphic sequence. The result — a sequence of a silhouette free-falling past vintage ads — became the indelible mark of “Mad Men.” “You never set out to make something iconic,” Frankfurt says. “A lot of what makes something iconic is repetition.”