Synchronization and Title Sequences - Now Available!

story © Michael Betancourt | published May 17, 2017 | permalink |  |  

You can now order my new book Synchronization and Title Sequences: Audio-Visual Semiosis in Motion Graphics!

It's part of the Routledge Studies in Media Theory and Practice series, and proposes a semiotic analysis of the synchronization of image and sound in motion pictures using title sequences as its focus. It is the second volume in Michael Betancourt's study of semiotics and cinema using the title sequence as a critical focus, allowing for a consideration of fundamental theoretical issues apart from both the issues of narrative and realism common to commercial media. Through detailed historical close readings of title designs that use either voice-over, an instrumental opening, or title song to organize their visuals--from Vertigo (1958) to The Player (1990) and X-Men: First Class (2011)--author Michael Betancourt develops a foundational framework for the critique and discussion of motion graphics' use of synchronization and sound, as well as a theoretical description of how sound-image relationships develop on-screen. The resulting study of synchronization is both a critical analysis and a theory of visual music in cinema.

story © Michael Betancourt | published March 2, 2017 | permalink |  |  

My article "Glitched Media as Found/Transformed Footage: Post-Digitality in Takeshi Murata’s Monster Movie" on the relationship between glitched videos and found footage is now available in Found Footage Magazine #3.

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story © Michael Betancourt | published January 25, 2017 | permalink |  |  

My new book, Semiotics and Title Sequences: Text-Image Composites in Motion Graphics is now in print! You can order a copy from the publisher's website today!

Title sequences are the most obvious place where photography and typography combine on-screen, yet they are also a commonly neglected part of film studies. Semiotics and Title Sequences presents the first theoretical model and historical consideration of how text and image combine to create meaning in title sequences for film and television, before extending its analysis to include subtitles, intertitles, and the narrative role for typography. Detailed close readings of classic films starting with The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari, and including To Kill A Mockingbird, Dr. Strangelove, and The Good, the Bad and the Ugly, along with designs from television programs such as Magnum P.I., Castle, and Vikings present a critical assessment of title sequences as both an independent art form and an introduction to the film that follows.

story © Michael Betancourt | published January 17, 2017 | permalink |  |  

I have some abstract photographs in Blacklie II. Now available here

story © Michael Betancourt | published January 1, 2017 | permalink |  |  

The designation “synchronized” identifies a particular relationship between the soundtrack and the imagetrack that is apparent to the audience as more than simply the coincidence of simultaneous presentation. The audience makes higher-level interpretations of structure and organization emerging over time from convergent events between sound and image. The identification of direct synchronization originates with its resemblance to phenomenal encounters in our everyday experience: when someone speaks, we see their lips move and we hear their voice as a conjoined encounter; the recreation of these types of synchronized relationship in motion pictures (unlike lived experience) is an artificial construction. In resembling our everyday experiences, the direct synchronization of sound and visual appears as an autonomous conclusion, its immediacy masking its underlying construction and artifice. Which sounds are combined with which elements in the image determines the character and nature of synchronization.

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