![]() ![]() It’s totally plausible-reasonable, even-for a Six Feet Under fan to have forgotten the particulars of how Nate Fisher (Peter Krause) ended up with a baby while still being able to storyboard the titles from memory.ĭanny Yount, a graphic designer and director based in Los Angeles, is a member of this small, close-knit community of visual magicians. The result is often something that lingers longer than the television series itself. Not as a half-hearted afterthought- think the Friends cast frolicking around the fountain-but as an opportunity to get the audience to invest deeply as quickly as possible. Naturally, after HBO sparked the original programming gold rush, the network’s effort to obliterate the prestige boundaries between television and film inevitably led the network to approach titles in the same way a film would. But the title sequence as an art form has primarily and most often flourished in the world of film, where budgetary and length flexibilities allow the latitude to include a sequence as breathtaking as the titles of David Fincher’s The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo. There are certainly iconic openers from the television of yore: Mary Tyler Moore’s hat toss the elegiac MA SH* credits the simple but authoritative title card of Dragnet. To see such a thoughtful, seductive, and meticulous title sequence as the one that kicks off Mad Men is a fairly recent trend for television. (It paid off-in 2008, they won an Emmy for their trouble.) It’s the bridge between our world and Draper’s-and it’s why a creative firm called Imaginary Forces spent weeks spitballing, storyboarding, and generally obsessing over a series of images that runs just shy of 40 seconds. The suspension begins with *Mad Men’*s much discussed title sequence, that elegant curtain-raiser with the stuffed-suit silhouette plummeting from a skyscraper, which acts as the initial invitation into this world of social upheaval, self-reflection, and three fingers of scotch on the rocks. ![]() See also: Kim Kardashian’s wedding Julia Stiles’s performance in … anything. The storyteller knows that just as easily as an audience can grant suspension of disbelief, it can also withhold it. This happens so often and so seamlessly that we take it for granted, but the storyteller can never take it for granted. We invest in Don Draper thanks to suspension of disbelief, the mechanism of negotiated delusion that allows a storyteller to present facts and the audience to accept them. Don Draper is Jon Hamm, a strong-jawed Missourian actor who, before landing the iconic lead role in Mad Men, toiled thanklessly in guest performances on The Hughleys and Charmed, to name a few. More than the fact that Don Draper is actually Dick Whitman, a child of poverty and an especially robust case study in Freudian psychosexuality, Don Draper is neither the child of a prostitute nor the alluring fantasy peddler he became. ![]()
0 Comments
Leave a Reply. |
AuthorWrite something about yourself. No need to be fancy, just an overview. ArchivesCategories |