Ethan Pollard! Production Methods! Professor Meranda! !2/20/2014! SAUL BASS! ! Saul Bass is one of the most influential designers of history, with work that is readily recognized and celebrated by many people on a daily basis, designers and non- designers alike. Bass was born in the Bronx, NY, in 1920. In 1936 he was awarded a scholarship to the Art Students’ League in Manhattan, where he studied design. He moved to Los Angeles in 1946 to work as an art director at an advertising firm, and in !1952, opened his own studio, Saul Bass & Associates.! Bass was incredibly prolific in his output, and is responsible for the designs of many of well-known logos, including United Airlines, Quaker Oats, AT&T, and the Girl Scouts. What he is most well-known for, however, is his work in film title design. In 1954 he made his first foray into this field with Otto Preminger’s Carmen. It was a year later, however, that his career in film titles bean to really take off. In 1955 he created the opening titles for Preminger’s The Man With the Golden Arm, starring Frank Sinatra as a jazz musician struggling with a heroin addiction. Bass’s titles feature a graphic, cutout- style image of an arm—an iconic image of drug addiction—and caused a sensation !upon the film’s release.! Until this point, film titles had always been a fairly dull necessity, often barely linked to the film they were preceding. Saul Bass changed all of that, making the film titles a preface for the film itself, using his incredible ability to distill the entire story to one iconic image. He went on to create many more masterpieces of title design, including Alfred Hitchcock’s Psycho and Vertigo, and Martin Scorsese’s Goodfellas and Cape Fear, to !name only a few.! Now you simply have to google ‘Saul Bass design’ to find dozens of posters or mock film titles copying his singular style. Saul Bass pioneered the art of film title design, and !left an enduring legacy on the graphic design world.! ! DANNY YOUNT! ! Danny Yount is a contemporary film title designer who is doing today what Saul Bass did in his era. Yount’s film titles take what Saul Bass did to new levels. Rather than just being a list of names and credits, they set the stage for the film and create a mood, giving the viewer subtle hints as to the tone, visual style, content, etc. Integrating music with beautiful imagery, motion graphics, and text, Yount’s opening sequences are some !of the most striking examples in cinema today.! Yount’s work has won two Emmy awards, and been nominated for another. Some of the films he has work on include Iron Man 1-3 (including the hologram sequences in Tony Stark’s laboratory), Sherlock Holmes 1-2, Tron: Legacy, Thor, Oblivion, and Kiss Kiss Bang Bang. In this last one, the influence of Saul Bass is most apparent, with cutout- !style figures and moving lines, yet taken to a new level for a new generation.! Danny Yount is building on the work of Saul Bass, and pushing the possibilities of film title design even farther, creating visual landscapes that tell a story in and of themselves. Bass refused to settle for the commonplace of his era, and Yount is doing the same today, searching for iconic imagery to convey the essence of each film he works on..