Title Sequence design : STEPHEN Film
Artist MELANIE MANCHOT invited me to design the title sequence for her first feature film, "Stephen" premiered at Liverpool Biennial 2023.
The film is a combination of narrative fiction with real-life observation, interviews and archive material. It takes the form of a film-within-a-film, inspired by a famous Mitchell and Kenyon movie, held at the British Film Institute archive: Arrest of Goudie, 1901 - the first ever crime-reconstruction and the very first film produced in Liverpool. The film takes us on intimate journeys into two characters as Stephen Giddings, the film's main character, auditions for and takes on a role in a movie. Produced with a mixed cast of people in addiction/recovery alongside four professional actors, the work presents alternative perspectives on urgent social questions including alcohol/drug misuse, gambling and mental health. As fiction merges with reality, the separation between person, actor and character begins to dissolve and the lines between what is real and what is fabrication start to blur.
VISUAL CONCEPT
The color spectrum reflects the film's palette: vibrant, saturated, and dense tones, including nostalgic 'Ektachrome' red from the 1980s and 1990s, and gold for typography.
The visual composition consists of static typography frames and solid colors, interspersed with brief sequences of flickering colors. These flashes of color evoke the flashing lights fruit machines and relate to TV or screens flickering, connecting with the idea that this is a film about filmmaking. In these rapid sequences of color change, individual tones blur, giving rise to a dynamic illusion of color, what we perceive is many colors fused into one.
The visual composition consists of static typography frames and solid colors, interspersed with brief sequences of flickering colors. These flashes of color evoke the flashing lights fruit machines and relate to TV or screens flickering, connecting with the idea that this is a film about filmmaking. In these rapid sequences of color change, individual tones blur, giving rise to a dynamic illusion of color, what we perceive is many colors fused into one.
