Saul Bass

Saul Bass was an American graphic designer and Academy Award-winning filmmaker.

His most renowned work however, was for his design on animated motion picture title sequences.


Bass worked for some of Hollywood's greatest filmmakers, including Alfred Hitchcock, Otto Preminger, Stanley Kubrick and Martin Scorsese. Amongst his most famous title sequences are the animated paper cut-out of a heroin addict's arm for Preminger's. The purpose of this imagery was to create a strong theme- addiction and drug abuse. Bass did this through skewing the paper cut-outs to give a jaunty effect- similar to addiction and drug abuse which is irrational and unstable. The Man with the Golden Arm



In Psycho, Bass's contributionbs were the vertical bars sweeping across the screen in a manic, mirrored helter-skelter motif at the beginning of Hitchcock’s 1960 horror. This staccato sequence is an inspired symbol of Norman Bates’ fractured psyche. Hitchcock also allowed Bass to work on the film itself, notably on its dramatic highpoint, the famous shower scene with Janet Leigh.



Bass created titles for other directors - from the animated alley cat in 1961’s Walk on the Wild Side, to the motor racing sequence in 1966’s Grand Prix.



'My initial thoughts about what a title can do was to set mood and the prime underlying core of the film's story, to express the story in some metaphorical way. I saw the title as a way of conditioning the audience, so that when the film actually began, viewers would already have an emotional resonance with it.- Bass

What i can learn from Saul Bass is that in order to create a strong effect or theme, the images that coincide have to reinforce that theme- for example, for a horror movie, i would now be less subtle about my choice of images. I can understand that Bass's work was limited due to it's time frame and somewhat amateur compared to present technologies but the ideas and thought processes are still key and relevant in modern film making.