Rob gets downright informative this week with his web discoveries.  First a super cool site called The Art of the Title Sequence: 

A compendium and leading web resource of film and television title design from around the world. We honor the artists who design excellent title sequences. We discuss and display their work with a desire to foster more of it, via stills and video links, interviews, creator notes, and user comments.

Featuring opening title design for film and television from Croatia, New Zealand, Serbia, Russia, the United States, Brazil, England, France, India, Japan, Italy, Chile, Mexico, Yugoslavia and Egypt.

For example, here is an interview they did with title sequence director Jim Capobianco and animator Alexander Woo from Pixar about the end title visuals from the movie Wall-E:

Art of the Title: What was your approach to directing the end credit sequence? What were the first questions you had and how were the answers arrived at?

Jim Capobianco: Unlike our credits in the past, the main goal of the credits was to finish the story. To communicate that the humans were going to be okay. They would survive. It became a balancing act of telling the survival story, using art history to do it and to make sure things weren’t too distracting from the names themselves.

ATS: How did you go about developing story with Scott, under the aegis of Jim?

Alex Woo: It was a lot of brainstorming and research. We started by figuring out the different points of the re-civilization process of Earth 2.0 that we wanted to highlight. The early stuff was pretty straight-forward: the invention of fire, irrigation, agriculture, etc. Things got more complex the further along we got on the civilization track (division of labor, trade, development of architecture). We didn’t want earth 2.0 to follow the same destructive path that forced the humans to leave the planet in the first place. We ultimately decided that we would stop our depiction of the re-civilization process somewhere before the industrial revolution. I think the last thing we depict is the discovery of electricity. Once we figured out which milestones we wanted to hit, it just became a matter of finding the connective tissue between those points.

ATS: What were your references? Why were these eras chosen?

JC: Andrew told us to make it as if you opened one of those enormous art history books we all had as art students. The difficulty was in what art to show, how to integrate it into the narrative and then to keep the animation economical. We knew from Kevin O’Brien’s beat boards that we would start with cave paintings but in Kevo’s initial pitch of the idea the art was all over the place. So we had to figure out timeline wise how to proceed. We soon realized that about the time of the Renaissance, art becomes associated with particular artists and more specific to that artist.

Before that it is easier to generalize the art. Some Egyptologist might be able to tell you who created certain Hieroglyphs but the audience is just going to lump together Egyptian Hieroglyphs. They are graphic, the greek pottery and mosaics also very graphic and lent themselves to a stylized simple form of animation but once you get into the renaissance everyone is saying that is Da Vinci or Michelangelo and things get complicated. You begin to ask yourself, “Are we saying that the Axiom Humans had another Da Vinci?” And it gets worse the more modern you get. So we started to refer to each section as a period and had to find an iconic style to represent that time in art which inevitably became associated with a famous artist of that time.

Storytelling reigns even in title sequences!

Re storytelling, of course we all know about Joseph Campbell and “The Hero’s Journey.”  And it’s probably true that almost all the screenplays we write have at the center of the narrative a character who is a hero.  But what is a hero?  Why are some people heroic and others not?  What is it in a person that can cause them to respond heroically in a crisis?  In this Newsweek article, a Stanford professor offers some insight into the making of a hero.  But perhaps the most fascinating things in the article is this:

By getting everyone to think of themselves as heroes in waiting, I think that will make it more likely when the opportunity comes that they’ll take action. So we’re experimenting with that idea in schools. We have a curriculum in Flint, Mich., with five classes of fifth graders, and we’ll also get kids to sign up on our Web site, to say, “I’m willing to be a hero in waiting, and while I’m waiting, I’m going to do a little heroic deed every day. I’m going to try to make someone’s life better. I’m going to get someone in my family to stop smoking. I’m going to organize my friends against bullying.” And when the opportunity for big heroism comes around to them, we hope they will be better psychologically prepared to act.

What if we were all heroes in waiting?  Indeed, perhaps we are already!

Finally here’s an article Rob found months ago, but it remained buried – until now: The 2010 American Movie-Goer Consumer Report.  Want to know who the audience is for that spec script you’re writing?  Check it out:

In any given month, over 56 million adults (26% of the adult population) make a trip to the cinema to take in a film. Movie-going typically reaches its peak in mid-summer, and 2009 was no exception. Experian Simmons DataStream^SM reports that in July of last year, 32% of adults went to movies, the highest level observed at any point in the year. In October of the same year, the percentage of past-month adult cinema-goers had dropped to just 19%, the lowest point observed in all of 2009.

In this month’s Consumer Insights report, Experian Simmons sizes the movie-going audience, examines their receptivity to cinema ads—including pre-show commercials and product placement within films—online movie searches as well as Americans’ penchant for tuning into the Academy Awards. All data comes from the Simmons Summer 2009 National Consumer Study.

Two-thirds of the adult population have gone to the movies at least once in the last 6 months. Nearly half (46%) have been in the last 90 days and a quarter (26%) have been in the last month. Young adults are, as expected, more likely to go to the movies than older adults, but adults over 50 outnumber young adults when it comes to raw number of movie-goers as you will see in the following chart.

Over 147 million individuals have gone to the movies at least once in the last 6 months. With 20.8 million adults ages 18 to 24 going to the movies in the last 6 months, this age group accounts for only 14% of the movie-going population. Adults ages 50 and over, on the other hand, account for 37% of the movie-going population with over 55 million adults in this age group going to the theater at least once in the last 6 months.

So I guess that because 37% of the people who go to movies are over the age of 50 explains why Hollywood is producing so many thought provoking dramas, smart political thrillers, and sweeping historical epics…

Wait.  Hollywood is not producing mostly those type of movies?  They’re basically chasing the 18-24 crowd who only account for 14% of the movie-going population?

Like William Goldman said about Hollywood: “Nobody knows anything.”

Thanks, Rob, for a particularly informative installment of Rob’s Finds.