Target Audience

It’s targeted to the movie lovers who have watched or the ones who have the potential to watch Moonlight. It is also dedicated to all the individuals who are treated and bullied unfairly and brutally, who question their identities and who deal with their mental traumas and emotions often.

Purpose

The original movie does not have a title sequence to show the teaser of what this movie is about, so I made my own attempt to analyze and express my visions and thoughts about race, identity and sexuality through the media with ink and water relationships as a metaphor. People should care because any bias and discrimination towards race and sexuality should not be tolerated by any chance. 

Research

As far as I research in the title sequences that different film industries have worked on, it shows that the designers love using different elements that they think metaphorically represent the shows without releasing spoilers, and that’s why I decided to go for this direction as well to contextualize the overall moods and tones of the movie without informing the viewers with literal contents.

Metaphorical Symbols

Clear Water:
Pure and innocent heart, true self
Blue Ink:
Loneliness, fear and sorrow
Bloody Red Ink:
Affection towards first love
& the urge of revenge to the bully

Purplish Color:
Twisting and fusing emotions
Wine Glasses:
Intimate moments in Chiron and Kevin’s reunion

Visual Reference

I was inspired by the smooth, sensitive and nostalgic vibes that the original soundtrack had brought to me as well as the overall blue tone aesthetics color palette when I watched the movie. In addition to that, I found inspiration in the multimedia artworks that use ink, pigment and liquids as the canvas to create visual tension and organic shapes.

Typography

In terms of font, I used a serif font called TT Barrels that has clean, humanistic and elegant traits. And for the typography treatment, I made them a little tilted to create interaction with water, and played with depth of field by making the background elements blurry and the foreground ones sharper. 

Media

The whole sequence was shot indoor with white foam core as background. To figure out the best conditions of the materials, I experimented with different temperature of water, containers and various kinds of ink, and finally settled down with acrylic ink for blue drops and food dye for the red ones. 

Overall it shows my skillsets of researching and creating moodboard references at the beginning, material explorations and live-action photo shooting with DSLR cameras, and the post-production including photo treatment and integrating typography into the compositions.