{"id":142,"date":"2025-12-06T23:54:39","date_gmt":"2025-12-06T23:54:39","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/sites.wsagames.com\/jz15n24\/?p=142"},"modified":"2025-12-11T00:00:35","modified_gmt":"2025-12-11T00:00:35","slug":"task-5-sonic-fiction","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/sites.wsagames.com\/jz15n24\/2025\/12\/06\/task-5-sonic-fiction\/","title":{"rendered":"Task 5: Art of Title"},"content":{"rendered":"\n

The opening credits are the emotional clues that a film and television work first reveals to the audience. Catch Me If You Can <\/em>(2002) presents a world of camouflage, escape and gameplay with light graphic animation; Dexter  <\/em>(2006), on the other hand, amplifies ordinary morning actions into a metaphor for violence with a sense of cutting, allowing the viewer to enter the character’s inner self the first time. These two completely different visual strategies, both in their own ways hint at the inner workings of the characters. In the opening credits of these two films and televisions, the visuals are not imitating reality, but exposing the essence of the characters, albeit in different ways, but with the same purpose.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Dexter’s creative director of the opening credits, Eric Anderson (2010), mentioned in an interview with Art of the Title, “Everything, no matter how mundane or beautiful, has an undercurrent of violence to it. It is just a matter of how closely you look”\u3002 This quote inspired me because it explained not only Dexter’s opening credits, but also the way the audience was watching the image. Dexter’s camera is so close that it puts what is already familiar on an unfamiliar scale: shaving is like cutting a throat, tying shoelaces is like strangulation. Violence is not the action itself, but the texture redefined by the camera. Dexter’s opening credits are amplified logic that the closer you get, the stranger it becomes; The more magnified, the closer it is to the reality of the character. Ordinary morning action images are small clips of the murder scene. This “violence hidden in everyday life” is Dexter Morgan’s life. The horror of the opening credits comes from the way it was filmed, not from the act itself. This macro photography approach leaves you with no way out, and you are forced to get close to the world of the protagonist.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Unlike Dexter, Catch Me If You Can’s opening credits chose a completely opposite strategy: it stretched everything away, simplified, symbolized, and it mimicked the graphic design tradition of the 1960s. This is not a lazy visual choice, but a perfect fit for the essence of the character Frank Abagnale Jr.: a con artist who constantly changes identities and should not have a clear face in the first place. If you compare them, you will find that both are not telling stories, but talking about “who is the protagonist”, and both use visual style instead of character psychological analysis.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Florence Deygas (2011) mentioned in an interview, “We used the same techniques as the film’s protagonist, by imagining the characters in stamp form, made from the same cutters as those used in the film by Frank.” Abagnale Jr. We wanted to preserve that crudeness\u201d\u3002 I think the rubber stamp here is not a visual style, but a “personality texture”. The engraved seals always have burrs, ink leaks, and small notches with broken lines, all of which are “imperfect first attempts”. Frank’s identity is the same: it is quickly generated, changeable at any time, and always unstable. The director’s insistence on retaining this roughness is also implying that Frank has been making a new self by hand all his life, layer after layer, like an endless seal.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Dexter uses magnification to reveal darkness, while Catch Me If You Can uses simplification to reveal falsehood; One forces you to get closer, the other allows you to see only the outline. These two seemingly different techniques are actually doing the same thing, both of which are a way to make the invisible visible visible and visualize the inner nature of the character.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

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Word count: 551<\/p>\n\n\n\n

References:<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Perkins, W. (2011) Catch Me If You Can \u2013 Interview with Kuntzel + Deygas<\/em>. Art of the Title. Available at: https:\/\/www.artofthetitle.com\/title\/catch-me-if-you-can\/ (Accessed: 2 December 2025).<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Ulloa, A. (2010) Dexter \u2013 Interview with Eric Anderson<\/em>. Art of the Title. Available at: https:\/\/www.artofthetitle.com\/title\/dexter\/ (Accessed: 2 December 2025).<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Image taken from Dexterby Eric Anderson, at 00:01:20, It shows how the author uses filming techniques to film the scene of tying his shoes every day into a crime scene of strangulation.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

The opening credits are the emotional clues that a film and television work first reveals to the audience. Catch Me If You Can (2002) presents a world of camouflage, escape and gameplay with light graphic animation; Dexter  (2006), on the other hand, amplifies ordinary morning actions into a metaphor for violence with a sense of […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":61,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[14],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-142","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-sight-sound"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/sites.wsagames.com\/jz15n24\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/142","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/sites.wsagames.com\/jz15n24\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/sites.wsagames.com\/jz15n24\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/sites.wsagames.com\/jz15n24\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/61"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/sites.wsagames.com\/jz15n24\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=142"}],"version-history":[{"count":2,"href":"https:\/\/sites.wsagames.com\/jz15n24\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/142\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":151,"href":"https:\/\/sites.wsagames.com\/jz15n24\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/142\/revisions\/151"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/sites.wsagames.com\/jz15n24\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=142"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/sites.wsagames.com\/jz15n24\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=142"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/sites.wsagames.com\/jz15n24\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=142"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}