Sunday, 25 January 2015

The Game title sequence analysis

I can make presumptions from watching The Game’s title sequence that it is of the genre drama mystery thriller. The sequence shows what seems like home video clips of a birthday party for a boy. The sequence also regularly cuts to a short video of a boy with his father. The sequence is done in a way that it creates mise-en-scene of a thriller with nostalgia that creates an eerie and spooky atmosphere.

Richard ‘Dr’ Baily created the title sequence. He had worked on many films including Fight Club and Superman Returns. When creating this title sequence Baily had to think about typography, soundtrack, iconography and mise-en-scene to create a successful piece of work.

The typography in this sequence is a white serif font. The typography is only featured during the puzzle piece part of the title sequence. This was done to put all attention on what was happening in the home videos part of the sequence. The font is in bold showing the importance of the text. The font colour is white because of binary oppositions, Black vs White. This could suggest Good vs Bad. The typography is also placed in the sequence to make it seem as if it was part of the puzzle. This maybe suggesting that the film is a puzzle waiting to be cracked. This is accompanied by a subtle smashing of glass, this could suggest that something is being smashed or cracked in the film.

The soundtrack for the sequence is by Howard Shore who is a renowned conductor famous for the scores for The Lord of the Rings trilogy. Baily probably chose Shore because he had previously written the score to Se7en which was a major success. In the sequence we can hear a piano playing softly with a sense of nostalgia to it. The piano though does have a sense of uneasiness and eeriness to it. It has a dark tone to it which is gentling yet suspicious.

The iconography in the clip shows things about the film and the characters in the clip. We see the puzzle pieces that transition between the cast and crew. This could represent many things. It could suggest that there is an enigma to the story that we as an audience must work out. This enigma would be the basis to the nostalgic clips. It could also suggest that a character in it has had a complicated life because a puzzle is complicated. This could be the boy we see at his birthday party. He may have secrets that we need to work out. It could suggest that there is a ‘puzzle piece’ of his life missing that he needs to find to settle things that had happened before in his life. This puzzle sequence was described by Fincher (Director or The Game) as “an elegant introduction to who the character is”.

The mise-en-scene is in the clip shows us that the boy’s family is wealthy because of the elegant setting and the sophisticated party that we see in the nostalgic footage. We regularly see the boy’s father in the sequence. This could be of importance in the clip. We see regularly cuts to mid-shots of the boy and his father together who seem as if they are having fun. This could represent a close and good relationship. Although at the end of the clip we see he boys father walk towards the darkness, this could connote a disappearance of the father in the boy’s life and possibly death.




As we delve deeper into the clip we can notice that there seem to be several shots where water plays a key part in the sequence this could represent a theme of water. There is a shot of a boy being pushed into a pool, the birthday boy holding a toy yacht with his father, a shot of a remote controlled boat in water and a final shot of the man splashing water in his face over a sink. This makes a subtle hint to the audience that that man is the birthday boy in the home videos. Whereas in the scene’s before the boy is happy and laughing in this scene he appears to be depressed and unhappy, showing something bad has happened in his life to make him feel this way.

No comments:

Post a Comment