Wir sind dann wohl die Angehörigen - Titles

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Title Design Pitch

Wir sind dann wohl

die Angehörigen

I had the possibility to pitch an opening and endcredits design-concept for the latest arthouse movie from Hans-Christian Schmid: "Wir sind dann wohl die Angehörigen." A story based on true events, adapted from the book with the same title from Johann Scheerer.

On March 25th 1996 J.P. Reemtsma was kidnapped from his home and was hold hostage for 33 days. How such dramatic circumstances hit the family - especially his 13 year old son Johann - what it does to their relationship and how they were pushed to react, is the central narrative.

Pitch concept

To come up with layouts substantiated by a solid concept, I decided to pitch a personal view I gathered throughout my research on the topic. In my opinion, the title design as a vessel can hold additional information subtly extending the main story and purposefully sets a basic mood for the audience. Therefore I focused on relationships, mainly between the father and the son and their communication through literature and letters. The kidnapping of the father is the overwhelmingly imminent reason, but - in my opinion - not the story told. The idea was to make the audience feel the hostage situation, while highlighting the basic parts of every communication visually: Bringing information from sender to receiver.

Notice:

This project was a commissioned pitch where the layout results eventually were not selected for the final movie. The displayed titles are draft titles from the initial pitch brief and represent not the final, approved titles or text panels. The footage and insights are shown with the kind permission of the production company (23/5 Filmproduktion). Nevertheless, the publication is made solely on my responsibility. 23/5 is not liable for the content.

This is a proof of concept animation to preview the motion of the different elements supposed to support the overall idea.

Notice: The showcased layouts are from the pitch presentation. For the final cut of the movie, the director selected another concept from another Designer, which is different from the one seen on this page.