Opening credits vs title sequence, and why the difference matters

When customers ask me for opening credits, they almost always mean a title sequence. The brief comes in with a logo and a name and then a few lines about how it should feel: dark, a bit old Hollywood, "like the start of a real film". Nobody writes a paragraph about mood for a list of names.

I don't correct anyone. The two words get swapped constantly and it barely matters until someone has to make the thing, at which point it matters quite a lot. Opening credits list people. A title sequence tells you what kind of thing you're about to watch, and of the two it's the only one that's design work in the full sense (credits can be set beautifully, plenty are, but their first job is to be read and then get out of the way).

As for why so few films bother with opening credits now: most of them moved the bulk of their names to the end by the mid-1970s, once crew lists got too long to sit through before the story. Directors also like to open on a scene. What's left at the front is usually a title card and a few stars, unless the film decides it wants a proper sequence.

Names in a contractual order

People assume the order of names on screen is the designer's call. Mostly it isn't. The Directors Guild of America had a rule that if anyone got a credit at the start of a film, the director's credit had to appear there too, and that rule is how a typesetting question turned into a union fight on The Empire Strikes Back. Star Wars had slipped past it in 1977 because "A Lucasfilm Limited Production" was treated as George Lucas's own credit, so the director was technically named up front. Three years later Irvin Kershner was directing, Lucas wanted the same clean opening and Kershner himself didn't object. The Guild did. Lucas resigned from it and kept his credit order, which is a fairly extreme thing to do over where a few words sit (SlashFilm has the whole story).

I like that detail more than I probably should. A credit list arrives with contracts attached before anyone opens a font menu, and whoever designs it is working inside rules somebody else wrote. Title sequences have rules too. Just fewer of them about billing.

The curtain note

The example everyone reaches for is Saul Bass's opening for The Man with the Golden Arm, released in December 1955. Otto Preminger directed, and he'd already hired Bass for Carmen Jones the year before. It was hand-drawn on an animation stand in black and white: white bars slide in and out against black before pulling together into a jagged, broken arm. Harold Adler did the lettering. Elmer Bernstein was writing the jazz score at the same time and gave Bass a beat to animate to, so the bars land on the music instead of drifting over it. Art of the Title has the sequence and its credits.

What stuck with me wasn't the arm, though. Preminger sent every print out with a note telling projectionists to open the curtains before they ran the first reel. A note like that only makes sense if titles had often been played to a closed curtain while people found their seats, and I suspect plenty of them had. So the instruction is really a statement about status: the opening is part of the film and you're expected to watch it. I'd argue that one sheet of paper did as much for title design as any frame Bass drew, which is my reading rather than anything the history books agree on.

Look at what the names are doing in there. They're all present, placed where they legally had to be and perfectly readable, but they sit inside an image about addiction that never shows a needle.

Where the line actually falls

The two overlap more than the definitions suggest. A credit list with real rhythm can feel designed, and a title sequence can be little more than one name held on a frame for exactly the right number of seconds. I've written separately about how title sequences, opening credits, idents and prerolls differ, because the labels start to matter once you're choosing what to make. Length doesn't decide it. Motion doesn't either.

Game of Thrones is the easy case, and I'd send anyone unsure where the line sits straight to it. The opening turns Westeros into a clockwork map, cities cranking up out of the ground as the camera travels between them, and the credits ride along inside that journey instead of sitting over a pretty background. Take the names away and the map still works, reminding you which places matter this season. A plain list of the same cast would do none of that. When someone asks me for a custom Game of Thrones title sequence it's the map they're after, pretty much never the names.

At the other end, a slow fade through thirty seconds of unrelated names stays a credit list however long it runs, while a four-second title that hits its beat can set the tone for a whole film.

Why the front of the film emptied out

Designers didn't lose interest in typography. The lists just got longer. Growing crew lists are what pushed most names to the end, and the front became a place for the title and the stars (No Film School's history of the form covers the shift). There's also a story that Steven Spielberg's audience surveys in the 1990s found people disliked opening credits. It gets repeated a lot and it's thinly sourced, so I'd treat it as industry folklore with a grain of truth in it somewhere.

Television went the other way for a long time, because a series has to reintroduce itself every week and the opening becomes part of the show's face. Then streaming put a button on it. Netflix built Skip Intro after finding that members manually skipped ahead in the first five minutes about 15% of the time, tested it on 250 series in the US, the UK and Canada and now sees it pressed around 136 million times on a typical day (Netflix's own account). Which is a weird number to sit with if you make openings for a living. A good sequence earns its time. A lot of them, frankly, don't, and the viewer now has a one-click way of saying so.

Two different briefs

When someone really does want opening credits, my first questions are boring ones. What are the names, what are the roles, who signed off the order and is any of it still likely to change before delivery? After that it's legibility and timing, enough time on each card for it to register and nothing clever.

A title-sequence brief starts somewhere stranger. I want to know what the opening should leave in the room before the first scene takes over. Cold or playful? Mechanical, maybe? Is the title part of the story's world or a piece of graphic design standing just outside it? Those answers change every frame, including the frames where a name appears, and they're the reason I don't treat every request in my intro catalogue as the same kind of job. A studio-style ident might be all a media server library needs. A custom sequence needs an idea, even when the final file is short.

The part of the Golden Arm story I keep coming back to is still Bernstein handing Bass a beat while the score was half written, and Bass building the bars to land on it.