Bob Kurtz

Title sequence designer case study:

Bob Kurtz

Bob Kurtz is the winner of over 250 awards including:

• Peabody award• Emmy award, • Annie Award for Lifetime Achievement, • Clio Awards, • U.S. Television & Film Festival - New York and many more.

Bob Kurtz was born in Los Angeles, California and graduated from the Chouinard Art Institute which is now called ‘The California Institute of the Arts’ Bob Kurtz is the founder of ‘Kurtz & friends animation’. He is also a director, producer, a artist and designer. He is also involved and has a career in films and Television commercials. He is a teacher of the ‘Character Animation program’ and has taught this in the ‘California institute of the arts’ as character animation is one of his specialties.

Kurtz and friends is a animation studio founded by Bob in 1981. The company was based in Burbank – California . Kurtz and friends were most known for producing film and television commercials. The first piece of work created by the company was the special effects for ‘A Midsummer Nights sex comedy’ in 1982. Working together with Kurtz, Kurtz and friends created the main titles for ‘The pink panther’, ‘Are we done yet’ , ‘George of the jungle’ and many more. Together they have also created several animation sequences and commercials.

Title sequence analysis 1:

The Pink Panther

The Pink Panther This image straight away suggests that it is a animated film genre. Also The contrast of colour between the pink and black shows that this film is aimed towards children because of the bright pink and lilac.

The pink typography is continuing the the friendly theme/mood of the title sequence once again due to the bright pink in contrast to the black to show it is more important.

The use of shadow is very effective as it creates another mood which is mystery and this is helped to be created by the use off sound. The music is a slow pace repeative sound to create meaning to the audience like there is a mystery that needs to be solved therefore a enigma has been created. Once again the colour contrast between the grey and yellow creates a friendly ambiance.

Here shows how the smashed title has been over exaggerated therefore once again suggesting children are the target audience as slapstick comedy is mostly used, this has created another genre in the film of comedy therefore the genre has become a hybrid.

Effect after breaking title – Slapstick comedy.

Bring, continuing the colour scheme of the pink panther. Also representing the film name.

Formal writing – representing detectives as they analyse text for evidence.

Position within the frame is central therefore showing the importance of the editor.

Detective kept within the frame to show how he is related to the text format.

The Pink Panther After working for Friz Freleng by writing some scripts for the original pink panther short films, Kurtz was chosen to create another title sequence in 2006 of the original 1963 version of ‘The pink panther.’

When the Pink Panther producers ran into trouble they decided to bring in three companies. As Bob Kurtz was known for his comedic film title skills he was chosen for the job. When Bob was brought in a title sequence had already been created but with the approval of the director but not all the other producers, the team began to panic and set up a competition in which the talented Kurtz won.

When Kurt went through the character creation stage he didn’t want to lose the pink panther style and flavour so Kurtz decided to edit the Pink panther with better animation effects rather than changing the appearance and loosing the reputation that the outstanding original Friz Freleng and Richard Williams produced.