Tuesday, 6 December 2011

Reminiscence - What's in a title?

When deciding the title for our horror film, we thought it was important that it would be a true representation of what the film would be about. In the case of our film, the title had to link to the theme of the past merging with the present, 'what comes back' in essence.

Other issues when deciding the title was the length of it, we wanted it to be short and simple, something that would stick in the minds of viewers easily. It was therefore necessary that we did not exceed a 3 word limit so as to keep it punchy and clear.

When considering the plot of our film, there was a lot of back story that needed to be addressed in the opening few minutes of footage, a way we thought would be good to cut down on this would be to include the date of the siblings death in the title, this would allow us to link events in the title sequence to the title itself even further than we had already envisioned. By doing this we are also able to deliver the same amount of information to our target audience, but in a way that is not going to bore them.

Lastly as our film was going to be in the horror genre we wanted the title to have a sense of eeriness about it, so as to immediately create an unsettling feeling in our audience.

With all these contributing factors we had many suggestions for the title, these ranged from "Happy Birthday" to "Resonance" and many others, but in the end we settled on the following:  



When we first mentioned this word for the title it immediately sounded right. Not a commonly used word it had the feeling of unsettlement in it's sound that we were looking for. It also had the distinct feature of portraying exactly what the film was about in just one word; the recollection of past events that create a mental impression and are then revived. The addition of the date underneath in the contrasting red creates viewer significance with the date as it stands apart from everything else and the red used connotes danger,l giving further meaning to the date. Finally the use of a font that was perceived to look similar to a child's handwriting ties in with the plot of the young child's death, while also making the title seem even more eerie than it already is.

1 comment:

  1. Good awareness of audience shown here in your decisions for your title

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