Credit where it’s due: Richard Morrison

People are constantly surprised when I tell them that a large part of my job is designing and creating the title sequences for movies. Most moviegoers are under the impression that the director of the whole film creates the opening and closing credits, but they don’t. It’s a completely different skill set. You have to be a director, animator, special-effects supervisor, typographer and graphic designer, all rolled in to one.

To be frank, most directors are glad to see me walk in the door. They’ve been shooting the movie for months and are fretting about the running time, the final edits, the dialogue looping. The last thing they need to worry about is the credits. But they know there’s a legal obligation to have 24 cards, or titles, with stipulations from lawyers about which of the stars gets billing where and for how long. Plus, as the legendary title-sequence designer Saul Bass said, the opening credits are a good way to get people settled in their seats before the narrative proper starts.

The stage at which I am called in varies. It can be six months before the release date, three months, even three weeks sometimes. It’s nearly always before the music is put on. In fact, I prefer the music not to be in place, so I can work in silence. However, I can hear the beats in my head when I’m storyboarding a sequence, because, after all this time, I understand how film music works. So it’s best to produce a ‘rough’ to length, get it past producers, directors, the studios, and then give it to the composer, who then has something to work with.

Subscribe to The Week

Escape your echo chamber. Get the facts behind the news, plus analysis from multiple perspectives.

SUBSCRIBE & SAVE

Sign up for The Week's Free Newsletters

From our morning news briefing to a weekly Good News Newsletter, get the best of The Week delivered directly to your inbox.

From our morning news briefing to a weekly Good News Newsletter, get the best of The Week delivered directly to your inbox.

Sign up

I started in the business at the age of 17, working for a trailer company called GSE Ltd, which was owned by the Carry On producers, Peter Rogers and Gerald Thomas. It was close to the main studios and it was there I met Maurice Binden, who was famous for designing the opening credits of the James Bond movies. Basically, he mentored me.

The first complete title sequence I did on my own was for the 1979 film Quadrophenia. In hindsight, what we were doing was fairly straightforward. Once you got over one or two technical problems, if you had a good grasp of graphic design, it wasn’t that difficult.

I suppose the real turning point in my career was Batman, in 1989. That was literally a back-of-a-fag-packet job. My idea of using the brand – the Bat symbol – in a non-traditional way won me that job. All I showed Tim Burton was a sketch of five frames, and explained how the camera would move 360 degrees around the logo in 3D, but at first you wouldn’t be sure what you were seeing. It was all analogue – there was a physical symbol, shot in stop-frame animation over five days. These days, you could CGI it, although it wouldn’t look the same.

I see other people’s title sequences I admire all the time. I thought Catch Me If You Can was wonderful. And on TV, Games of Thrones has a brilliant opening that takes the viewer straight into that world, but also carries information about what is happening in each episode.

People ask if I ever want to direct a whole film, but I’m not sure. I’ve done some work on the main body of films – for Sam Mendes on Skyfall, for instance. If one comes, it comes, but I’ve seen what hard work it can be. To be honest, I like doing what I’m doing, making little movies.

Richard Morrison is creative director and producer at The Morrison Studio, and a graphic design and television-channel branding specialist. The partner of choice for directors such as Tim Burton and Ridley Scott, he has designed the titles for an array of acclaimed films, including Brazil, Sweeney Todd and Jupiter Ascending