Opening credits are often treated as the administrative part of a movie: names to be delivered before the story can begin. Yet a title sequence can make the first decisive interpretation of that story. It chooses whether a name arrives as a wound, a monument, a joke, a warning, or an object with weight. It can teach the eye to expect fracture or flow before a character has crossed the frame.

That makes title design closer to editing than to labeling. The designer selects a small set of materials—letterforms, movement, color, sound, photographed objects—and cuts away nearly everything else. The result need not summarize the plot. Its more interesting task is to establish a way of watching: the emotional pressure and visual behavior through which the film will become legible.

The two videos below show that work at different scales. Art of the Title's brief visual history moves across four decades of sequences by Saul and Elaine Bass, allowing recurring ideas to surface through montage.[1][3] The Academy's profile of Dan Perri pauses over one designer's process and several sharply different solutions.[2] Perri was mentored early in his career by Saul Bass, but the pairing is not a simple story of inheritance.[7] It is a conversation between two durable principles: find a concentrated metaphor, then let each film dictate how that metaphor should move.

Saul and Elaine Bass: make the threshold part of the movie

Art of the Title's video is only one minute and forty-six seconds long. That compression is appropriate. It does not lecture about the Basses; it lets a rapid succession of title designs demonstrate how much cinematic argument can fit into line, type, rhythm, and transition.[1] The sequence runs from the stark mid-century work associated with films such as The Man with the Golden Arm, Vertigo, North by Northwest, and Psycho to later collaborations with Martin Scorsese.[1][3]

Watch first for difference, not signature. The broken arm of The Man with the Golden Arm condenses a forbidden subject into one jagged emblem. The spirals of Vertigo promise attraction that cannot hold a stable center. In North by Northwest, ruled lines and moving type turn a flat graphic grid into the glass face of a building; abstraction quietly hands the viewer to photographed city space. Psycho makes words split, slide, and fail to remain whole. These sequences do not share one surface style. They share a belief that typography can perform the film's governing pressure rather than merely name it.

The Academy Film Archive describes Bass as a designer who revolutionized the feature-film title sequence, and its collection holds 2,700 film items from his work.[4] But the singular surname can hide a collaboration. Elaine Makatura joined Saul Bass & Associates in 1955, and Art of the Title explicitly notes that much of the title and film work after 1960 was made with Elaine Bass.[3] The RIT Cary Graphic Arts Collection likewise places their Hollywood work inside a shared practice that moved across graphic design, title making, and filmmaking.[5] Keeping her name visible changes the history from the myth of one inspired logo maker to the reality of a studio process involving direction, production, photography, editing, and music.

The montage's most useful lesson is therefore not “make every title look like Saul Bass.” Imitation would reduce a method to torn paper, bold shapes, and mid-century type. The deeper method is to identify a film's active verb. Vertigo spins. Psycho fractures. North by Northwest routes and redirects. Once that verb is found, the credit sequence can give names behavior and make the audience feel a formal rule before the narrative explains anything.

That is why the sequence functions as a threshold rather than a detachable preface. It helps the viewer cross from auditorium, living room, or phone screen into a particular cinematic logic. The first scene does not have to start that work from zero; the titles have already adjusted balance, pace, and expectation.

Dan Perri: give each film the letters it needs

The Academy's Dan Perri profile changes the emphasis from a historical sweep to a working designer handling problems. Perri discusses titles for The Exorcist, Star Wars, and Raging Bull, films whose openings could hardly behave less alike.[2] The Museum of the Moving Image describes his approach as a fifty-year practice capable of moving from Nashville's loud sales pitch and Taxi Driver's neon haze to the Star Wars crawl and The Warriors' painted city.[6] Variety is not indecision here. It is evidence that the film, rather than the designer's brand, remains in charge.

Perri's central standard is evocation: the title should call up an emotion and point toward story, character, or setting while introducing the required words.[2] That sounds modest until one notices how often those obligations pull apart. A studio needs legible names. A director needs tone. Music imposes duration and accents. The film may need to enter quickly, or it may need a ceremonial approach. Good title design does not eliminate those constraints; it gives them one piece of behavior.

The Star Wars crawl is the clearest demonstration. Perspective turns exposition into travel. The words do not sit on a neutral card; they recede toward the same unreachable distance that the film's spaceships will soon cross. Perri's early designs and the surviving alternate treatments show that an iconic solution was not inevitable. It was developed through sketches, tests, rejection, and mechanical image-making.[2][6][7] The famous crawl works because its movement makes scale and serial adventure present before the first spacecraft appears—not because the typography is generically “futuristic.”

Raging Bull demands the opposite tempo. In Perri's account, the title closes the space between its two words and places red lettering against a black-and-white image of Jake LaMotta moving alone in the ring. He also slowed the already overcranked footage further through optical copying.[7] The design holds violence in suspension. Red supplies an alarm, the compressed wordmark refuses breathing room, and extreme slowness turns warm-up movement into a trapped ritual. Nothing crawls toward a horizon; the image circles inside one man's pressure.

The Academy video also restores physical labor to a field now easily mistaken for software presets. Letterforms and emblems appear as made objects and photographed elements, not merely selections from a menu.[2] That materiality matters because a title's texture can carry meaning: an edge can look cut, painted, stamped, projected, or exposed onto film. The choice tells us what kind of world the name belongs to. Digital tools expand the available motions, but they do not answer the first question—what should these words feel like here?

Perri's connection to Bass is most valuable at that level. The lesson was not to repeat a recognizable graphic accent. It was to take the opening seriously as filmmaking. A title designer responds to the whole picture, reduces it without flattening it, and returns a concentrated experience that can survive contact with music, projection, and the scene that follows.[6][7]

The first cut is an argument

Seen together, the videos make title design look like a form of editorial judgment. The Basses show how a governing metaphor can organize motion: split, spiral, grid, rush. Perri shows why no single visual vocabulary can answer every film. One method searches for the core pressure; the other insists that the pressure must be translated anew.

This also clarifies the difference between an opening title and a logo. A logo must remain stable across posters, trailers, packaging, and years of circulation. A title sequence lives in time. It can delay recognition, change scale, disappear, collide with sound, or hand one texture to the first shot. The same lettering may serve both jobs, but cinema begins when the design acquires duration and a relationship to what comes next.

The practical viewing question is simple: after the names have passed, what has the sequence trained you to notice? If the answer is only “who worked on the film,” the credits have met a basic obligation. If the answer includes a rhythm, instability, physical sensation, or way of reading space, the titles have also made the film's first cut—an argument about which of its many possible meanings should reach us first.

That argument deserves attention precisely because it does not delay the movie. It is already the movie: labor made visible, language given cinematic behavior, and an audience quietly taught how to enter.

Sources

1. Art of the Title, “The Title Design of Saul and Elaine Bass,” YouTube video — a visual history of the Basses' title work from the 1950s through the 1990s.
2. The Academy, “Title Design: The Making of Movie Titles,” YouTube video, July 25, 2016 — Dan Perri on evocation, letterforms, physical process, and designs for The Exorcist, Star Wars, and Raging Bull.
3. Art of the Title, “The Title Design of Saul and Elaine Bass,” May 8, 2014 — publication context and attribution of the post-1960 work to Saul and Elaine Bass.
4. Academy Film Archive, “Saul Bass Collection” — institutional overview of Bass's film work and the Archive's 2,700-item collection.
5. RIT Cary Graphic Arts Collection, “Saul Bass” — collection guide covering Bass's design formation, Elaine Bass's collaboration, and the move from advertising into film titles.
6. Museum of the Moving Image, “Dan Perri and the Art of the Title Sequence,” 2022 — exhibition overview of Perri's film-specific designs and title work as a tonal entrance to a movie.
7. Will Perkins, “Dan Perri: A Career Retrospective,” Art of the Title, March 18, 2017 — long-form interview on Perri's mentorship, optical process, and work on The Exorcist, Star Wars, and Raging Bull.
8. Dan Perri, “Bio” — the title designer's official biography and source of the classroom photograph used as this article's lead image.