Kyle cooper

I chose one of my favourite designers; Kyle Cooper the creator of many memorable title sequences like Se7en, Flubber, Spiderman, Spiderman 2, Mission: Impossible, The Mummy, Dawn of the Dead, The Incredible Hulk and many more, to look into his influences and interests. Kyle is still very proud of his work and doesn't regret any of them, he pushes the boundries especially for 'Dawn of the Dead' by using real blood. One of his influences helped him base his sequence from the film 'Se7en' to a classic sequence for 'To Kill A Mockingbird" created by Stephen O. Frankfurt.

'To Kill A Mockingbird' - Stephen O. Frankfurt.

'Se7en' - Kyle Cooper

Cooper's style is very similar to Frankfurt's in this sequence with the live action filming, up close and personal, so it feels like your the one doing the things it shows in both sequences, you get the same feel for them, although 'To Kill A Mockingbird' is really different to the film 'Se7en' the mood is different you still think the same in the way that you know where cooper got his idea from.

From an interview by ThunderChunky.co.uk

"You have been cited as the most influential film credit designer since Saul Bass. Was his work an inspiration to you?

Not as much as people who have written about me have suggested. I love Walk On The Wild Side and Man With The Golden Arm but I actually have gotten much more familiar with his work after I started doing this. Paul Rand was my mentor and he and Saul Bass were often compared to each other. There is no question that Saul Bass is the father of film titles but Paul Rand was the father of American graphic design. Mr. Rand and my teachers at Yale did not hold up Saul Bass as a great designer. I think Saul Bass’s contribution is obvious and I love the later work he did with Martin Scorsese but by Rand’s standards Bass was not a typographer. I prefer the Westinghouse logo to the Minolta logo. The thing with Rand also was that he did everything with his own hand and I do not think as far as the logos go that was the case with Saul Bass. But again I do not consider myself worthy to be compared with either of these men but I will press on and hopefully get better."

Saul Bass was one of the first to realize the creative potential of the opening and closing credits of a film and started to experiment in different ways to draw the attention of viewers and try to create different moods to suit the nature of the film itself.

'Anatomy of a Murder' - Saul Bass




Paul Rand was a graphic designer who wanted to push boundaries and experiment to create a certain mood in his work that would suit a certain situation, also to make it memorable and have a meaning that everyone gets straight away like Saul Bass and Kyle Cooper in their title sequences.

Direction Magazine, 1939 - Paul Rand




'Kiss Kiss Bang Bang' - Danny Yount & Kyle cooper

Many designers get their influences and ideas from what they have seen and incorporate them into their own work like you can see above.