Sandwiched in the popcorn-scented haze between trailers and the feature presentation, movie titles have to balance Tinseltown ego trips and typographic design, to say nothing of settling viewers and setting the scene. Ten years ago, designer David Peters started building a collection of this underappreciated art form, from the bombers-in-love opener of Dr. Strangelove (1963) by old-school maverick Pablo Ferro to the title sequence of Seven (1995) by present-day hotshot Kyle Cooper. Now a film fest of sorts, drawn from Peters' archive and organized with writer Ken Coupland and designer Dav Rauch, is traveling to museums around the country (visit www.designfilms.org for a schedule).
These pieces, Peters argues, belong in the category of design film, which includes credit crawls, instructional videos, docs, and demos - works created to convey information and to entertain. Movie titles, he says, are closely related to another kind of graphical user interface: "They're a manifestation of the experience that people now take for granted on the Internet."
ELECTRIC WORD
Shadow Warrior
New Maeda
Ticker Transplant
Sonic Room
Open Shuttle
Capturing Eyeballs
