Initial Ideas

When watching Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind with the intention on looking for inspiration and ideas for the opening title sequence, I noticed that the main character Joel (Carey) used a journal, and this featured heavily at the beginning of the film and was key throughout. This got me thinking about maybe using some kind of writing technique in the opening title. The film is based on the idea of someones personal memories, thoughts and feelings, and a journal or diary is a place where a lot of personal thoughts and feelings are kept, especially in Joel's case. I therefore decided using a journal with doodling and notes in would be a nice idea for the titles, as is is linked directly to the themes of the film without giving any of the plot away.

Then after researching some other opening title sequences and realising that the main characters are almost always used to introduce the film, my journal idea turned into a scrapbook idea. I thought that I could feature the main characters and themes in the film using stills and put them altogether in a book, with a hand, writing important quotes from the film and the cast and crew information, so that it looks as if we are looking into Joel's journal and he is writing down the film info.

I am going to do a test of this using printed images from the film and putting them into a note book which i will then film with my camera. For the real piece I will be creating the scrapbook digitally, but for a test, a real book will be fine.