Saul BassRhianna Griffin

Born May 8, 1920 New York City

Died April 25, 1996 (aged 75) Los Angeles

Occupation Graphic designer, title designer, film director

I want to make beautiful things, even if nobody cares, as opposed to ugly things. That’s my intent.—Saul Bass

Who is Saul Bass?

• A Graphic designer and filmmaker, he’s known best for his film posters and title sequences.

• During his 40-year career Bass worked for some of Hollywood's most prominent filmmakers, including Alfred Hitchcock, Otto Preminger, Billy Wilder, Stanley Kubrick and Martin Scorsese. Among his most famous title sequences are the animated paper cut-out of a heroin addict's arm for Preminger's The Man with the Golden Arm, the credits racing up and down what eventually becomes a high-angle shot of a skyscraper in Hitchcock's North by Northwest, and the disjointed text that races together and apart in Psycho.

• Bass designed some of the most iconic corporate logos in North America, including the Bell System logo in 1969, as well as AT&T's globe logo in 1983 after the breakup of the Bell System. He also designed Continental Airlines' 1968 jet stream logo and United Airlines' 1974 tulip logo, which became some of the most recognized airline industry logos of the era.

Film posters

• From the late 1940’s until the early 1990’s, he created more than a dozen campaigns for films, with an even higher number dedicated to title sequences. Bass' work was risky, his posters were largely stripped down affairs that focused and strengthened attention rather than overwhelmed and scattered it into a million pieces. Colours were few, but bold in their application. The text and imagery itself was often treated similarly to a logo or a symbol: strong, simple, memorable, metaphorical, and easily applied to any number of other graphic applications.

Title Sequences

• Most relevant to our thriller is his work on the sequence ‘Cape Fear’ We have analysed this opening in a previous blog and his work will influence the decisions we will make in creating a title sequence for our film. I particularly like the simplistic nature of his title sequences- these use connotations instead of description. As the mind is the most powerful tool in creating fear his sequences were extremely effective in building the mood for each film.

‘It’s a Mad Mad Mad world’

‘West Side Story’

Watching title sequences by Bass is included in research and planning for our thriller.We could gain inspiration through real media texts.