Title sequences should capture the essence of a film. And they also often exact a toll on the designer working to achieve that essence. Ross MacDonald worked on the film titles and MOEs for director Blitz Bazawule’s The Color Purple. It was an intensive experience, one we “talked” about in a recent email exchange.
“MOE” stands for Main on End—one of the many fun facts MacDonald learned when he did props for titles designed and produced by the North Hollywood-based Team Apsect for Shazam: Fury of the Gods, which led to the Color Purple collaboration.
When it came to the front main title, “[Team Aspect] had wanted to use a Clarendon for the title, but there were concerns about cost—the digital foundries apparently charge $$$ for use on film credits. I butted in and said, ‘You know I have a letterpress shop, right?’ I just happened to have a four-inch thick stack of proofs of all my wood type sitting on an old piano stool next to my desk; I picked it up and fanned through the various Clarendon wood type fonts. They all swooned a little bit, so I set and proofed a bunch of type and sent them photos of the process to sweeten the deal.
“But Blitz wasn’t digging it—he didn’t like the beat-up look of some of the type. So I bowed out at that point and continued working on the MOE for several weeks.”
The MOE for The Color Purple is a series of images of quilts. “I did art that the VFX team turned into incredibly realistic images of hand-sewn quilts,” MacDonald wrote. “The camera is kind of zooming over the quilt as it ripples and moves. At first, Blitz said he didn’t want to show scenes from the film. Then he did a 180, so most of the images are inspired by scenes in the film. I had to watch rough cuts of the film over and over, and use maybe a hundred screen grabs for reference.”
There are loads of sketches and art for the MOE, but you get a taste from the examples below. And since the film is still in the theaters, MacDonald apologized there are no available online images of the credits. “Nonetheless,” he confirmed, “they did use the quilting images in the final cut of the film.”
Hallelujah!
