Film titles and letter cards had to provide essential information to the viewer. For reasons such as ease of production and clarity, artists favored mono-stroke letterforms or characters with small serifs. White lettering on a black background is another characteristic of this era, because titles simply looked better this way when projected with live-action B&W film.
This shows how, in the early stages of the film industry, title sequences and letter cards were vital to a film to help the audience understand the plot and story of the film. Without dialogue it was very difficult to understand some elements of the film and so titles and letter cards would help the audience to connect to the film.
As movies grew more popular, their titles evolved. Movie producers invested considerable sums in film production and sometimes resorted to fixing a dog of a film by rewriting the inter-titles. For a time, “film doctor” Ralph Spence (1890–1949) was the highest-paid title writer in the industry, earning $10,000 a picture for his one-liners.
This shows how important film titles got the more popular films got in the early 1900's. Ralph Spence would earn $10,000 for doing the titles and letter cards for one film and due to him being a popular title writer meant he could earn even more than that in one year, showing the importance of title sequences in early films.
During the 1920s and ’30s, European cinema was deeply influenced by modernism, and aspects of this visual sensibility were brought to the US by filmmakers who were fleeing the Nazis. Meanwhile, the studio systems operating in Europe and Hollywood also delighted in creating titles that featured vernacular graphic novelties. As much as possible, they liked to convey the tone of a movie through the “dressage” of its main title. Thus, blackletter fonts in the opening credits were used to evoke horror, ribbons and flowery lettering suggested love, and typography that would have been used on “Wanted” posters connoted a western flick.
This discusses how, during the 1920s and '30s, film makers began to make their opening titles more suited to the genre and plot of the film. It shows how film makers began to realize the potential of relating a title sequence to the film and how it can help an audience understand the mood and context of the film before it has even really began.
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