What's in a Name?

Do you agonise about a movietitle as much as I do?

I prefer a title do do several things:

• it has to grab my interest - there's nothing better than a title that makes me want to watch even if I know nothing about the content yet!
• I love hidden meanings which manifest themselves only after I watched the film
• double-entendres (sp?), wordplays - get me every time!
• I like 'em either short (often prefer just one word) - or, very seldomly, ridiculously long :p

As a result, I often spend a large amount of time on agonising about a title.
'Saving Grace' for example went through several different ones - among them 'Parted', 'Disconnected' (both got scrapped immediately), 'Headway' (not good either); I looked up definitions, quotations.... until the scripting reached the stage where her husband sends his message, and the wordplay popped into my mind - bingo! From that moment on, there was never a doubt in my mind that 'Saving Grace' it would be. It ticked all my preferences - short, lots of double meaning...

For other films, titling was easy - :transient:, for example was a given from the first images that flodded my mind upon hearing the music for the film... I also like to use things like slashes or colons in my titles - don't ask me why, but they're a part of the name, not an addendum; without them, the title wouldn't have the same meaning for me (and it always makes me very unhappy when I can't add them to the upload title of the film; some sites don't allow them).

'Secret project' has finally been titled - it had a working title, of course, in fact, actually two working titles, that I didn't like. Both didn't really tickle my interest - one would have probably made people think about a TV series the film has no connection whatsoever to, the other was just - lame... short, which I usually like, but not encompassing everything I wanted it to say.

Thankfully, my friend Norrie, who always proof-reads my scripts and is the bouncing-board for my ideas (thank you so much for that! :)) came up with the perfect title (yay!) - it has the right flow, the right length, it hits home; and no, I won't write it down here - yet. ;)

So - how do you title your films, and do you think the viewer places as much importance on it as I (or maybe we, we'll see about that) do?

Lethal Entertainment

I've already planned to have a site for my films when I worked on the Creative Voice website - now it's online!

Lethal Entertainment is the home of everything 'sisch' - anymation/machinima related - as of now, it features Kate Lee's 'The Afflicted' with detailed background information, a films archive where you'll find everything you ever wanted to know about my older films, homages to voice-actors and modders.... and in the future it will have quite an extensive production diary - yeah, yeah, I'm talking 'bout that secret project again... ;)



Hope you'll enjoy visiting the site! There's also a new link added to the navigation bar of this blog!