TITLE SEQUENCES
"GameBox 1.0"
PICTURE EDITOR/SOUND EDITOR/TITLE DESIGN
As an editor, one of my goals is to try to establish a style or tone at the beginning of a film that clues the audience in as to what sort of picture they'll be watching. "GameBox 1.0" was an interesting challenge. The story involved a futuristic-looking virtual reality headset delivered by a myseious mail truck to random recipients. Charlie, the main character in the film, receives a headset, tries it on, and is told by a disembodied voice: "once you begin, you won't be able to quit." This proves all too true, as Charlie soon finds himself trapped inside frightening, alternate worlds, unable to distinguish the game from reality.
As opposed to other virtual reality films such as "Brainstorm," "The Matrix," and David Cronenberg's "eXistenZ," among others, "GameBox" -- Like "Tron" -- tried to make a connection between virtual reality and video games (the phrase "virtual reality" is never used in the film). To complicate matters, the movie began with a scene strongly suggestive of a horror film: a sleeping teenager is killed after he running through a strange world, fleeing a villain. This of course was the basic premise of "A Nightmare on Elm Street." So to establish the video game/virtual reality angle, and to help prevent the audience from thinking they are watching a horror film, I created the below title sequence to preceed this scene.
Using a four-panel split screen that to some may suggest a 4-player game screen, I borrowed an (unused) closeup of a hand pressing a video game controller from another scene (Sequence 1 on the "GameBox" Main Page), then used images from "Halo" and other video games on the TV screen in that scene -- and then borrowed a shot of the mysterious black game unit, used by the Charlie in another scene.
Hopefully when the nightmare scene begins after this title sequence, the audience will know what kind of movie they're watching, and will make a connection between the boy's nightmare, the mysterious headset, and the science and technology of the interactive game world depicted in the film.
"GameBox 1.0" main page
TITLE SEQUENCES
