Titles and Trailers: The Films Before the Film Workshop

Titles and Trailers: the films before the film

Typography, narrative ambiguity & the psychology of cinematic expectation

Posters, trailers, and title sequences are not simply introductions to a film; they are already part of its psychological experience, shaping expectations and inviting audiences to imagine stories they have yet to encounter. These are the films before the film: compressed, often ambiguous expressions whose imagery, typography, and sequencing can suggest multiple emotional and narrative worlds. For the audience, they are thresholds into the unknown; for the filmmaker, they are distillations of tone, tension, and atmosphere, constructed by working backward from the film itself. This workshop explores that inversion and the fertile space between artistic intention and audience interpretation where cinematic meaning emerges.

Join Professor Shawn Brixey for a hands-on workshop on Wednesday, November 18th from 2:30 to 5:00 p.m. at The Depot. In this hands-on, 150-minute workshop, students use fixed images, a shared title and tagline, and six cinematic stills to discover how typography and sequence construct entirely different films in the imagination. No new footage or specialist production software is required. Please bring a laptop to participate in the workshop activities.

The Workshop: 2 hours 30 minutes

Context — the psychological overture

A brisk visual history of titles and trailers: from credit conventions to experimental cinematic language, type, and audience expectation.

Act I — three posters, one film

Teams make three versions of one poster. The photograph, film title, and tagline stay fixed; typeface, pairing, scale, hierarchy, and placement change the film’s apparent character.

Act II — six images, multiple films

Using the same six stills, teams arrange a suggestive opening sequence. Order creates tone, tension, and narrative ambiguity; nothing new is filmed.

Act III — the reversed reveal

Show the six-image sequence first, without explanation. The audience describes the film it imagines; only then do the three posters appear. The class selects the best fit before the team reveals its intention.

Synthesis — making the threshold

Compare intended and received meanings. How does a filmmaker work backward from the film’s psychology to construct an audience’s point of entry?

The Takeaway

Three typographic poster treatments, one six-frame sequence, and a collective critique of how cinematic meaning is proposed, received, and reinterpreted.

The filmmaker creates the conditions for meaning; the audience participates in completing it.