Thursday 21 December 2006

Kyle Cooper






































Kyle Cooper, like Saul bass before him, is most famous for his motion graphics and title sequences, and generally revered as successor to Bass. Cooper studied at Yale under graphic design guru Paul Rand where Rand discouraged him to do his dissertation on movie titles, instead suggesting he look at Soviet cinema masters such as Sergei Eisenstein.
Upon receiving his MFA Cooper went on to work for R Greenberg Associates, designing credits for "True Lies" and "twister" before getting his big break designing the credits for David Fincher's "Se7en" in 1995. This set him up as the new master of the genre; abrasive and highly stylized, featuring hand scratched lettering, shaky tense imagery set to Nine Inch nails "Closer", and really set the tone for the film.and left in 1996 with two RGA colleagues Chip Haughton and Peter Frankfurt to set up Imaginary Forces where he designed titles sequences for loads of huge movies including Mission Impossible, Spider-Man, Arlington Road, The Island of Dr Moreau, Spawn and Zoolander, utilizing a wide range of techniques from Maya to super 8 film, Montage to typeface design and all manner of digital technology, Photoshop and After Effects and is known to look into each project in a manner similar to how a method actor might research a film role, a total obsessive perfectionist.

Cooper's role at IF was so successful he ended up doing more management and less hands on work, and being something of a perfectionist he went on to go on his own, setting up a new smaller company Prologue, continuing his film title work for movies such as Superman Returns and venturing into the world of videogames, designing the credits for Metal Gear Solid 3.
Kyle Cooper has brought new attention to the art form of movie titles, spawing copycats and imitators.

My View :

Kyle Cooper is for me very inspirational. It is good to see be able to aspire to this level of success, whether that be commercial or artistic, in Kyle Cooper's case both. I would very much like to work in this area myself, even though at this point in time i think i will need to put loads more time, work and effort to do it! The showreel at Prologue excites me and I eagerly want to learn this.

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