"I had the standard movie geek childhood, because for as long as I can remember all I wanted to do was make movies."
— Paul Thomas Anderson
— Paul Thomas Anderson
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Silhouettes of Alfred Hitchcock and Cary Grant on the set of Notorious, 1946.
The notebooks themselves were created by designers Clive Piercy and John Sabel, who filled the pages with large blocks of text, broken only by the occasional macabre photograph or ambiguous artifact taped in place.
[The team] photographed books and shadows and mapped it all out with stills to get an idea of what it would look like when you see through the pages and you see the shadows behind the page and the backlight.
The typography itself was hand-etched into black-surface scratchboard and manipulated during the film transfer process to further smear and jitter it. This transfer was then cut up and reassembled during post production to add a final layer of temporal distress.
“[Fincher] knew that he wanted it to be drawn by hand, because it was from the mind of the killer, and I was taking that further, wanting it to be like the killer did the film opticals himself.”
Even though digital editing and compositing were already commonplace in Hollywood and especially in post-production, Cooper and his team opted to assemble the majority of the sequence by hand, giving it an analog warmth and randomness which may have otherwise been cheapened by digital effects.
Orson Welles - The Third Man (1949)
Photography is truth. The cinema is truth twenty-four times per second.
This inhuman place makes human monsters.
GALLERY: EVERY MOVIE POSTER THAT SAUL BASS EVER MADE
Legendary graphic designer Saul Bass is rightly remembered for his incredible skill and seemingly unending creativity, a man who cared deeply about making things beautiful, even if no one else did. His work exists as a testament to the idea that good design can exist even in the most monetarily concerned places. From the late 1940’s until the early 1990’s, he created more than a dozen campaigns for films, with an even higher number dedicated to title sequences. Bass’ work was risky, his posters were largely stripped down affairs that focused and strengthened attention rather than overwhelmed and scattered it into a million pieces. Colors were few, but bold in their application. The text and imagery itself was often treated similarly to a logo or a symbol: strong, simple, memorable, metaphorical, and easily applied to any number of other graphic applications. Here is a gallery of every significant movie poster Saul Bass ever designed (absent are ones for which he is falsely credited, like “West Side Story”), including one for an Irvin Kershner film that never reached production.