Applied Animation: Lemony Snicket's A Series of Unfortunate Events

I chose to look at this title sequence because I feel that the mood and tone of the book that this film was adapted from has a similar style and mood to the book that I'm looking at for this project. Both of these books contain a nonsensical element and strong sense of fantasy and a slight sense of darker humour. I wanted to explore how the mood and tone of the book was achieved through this title sequence in order to gain some more insight into how to do the same for my title sequence.

The film itself opens up with an animated sequence that is completely off topic and completely irrelevant, or so it would appear, to the story that actually commences throughout the film and then it cuts to a scene in which the narrator introduces the story. The title sequence creates this sense of false happiness and lulls the audience into a false sense of security before telling them of the real nature of the film. I'm not quite sure why the film does this, or whether it holds any actual relevance to the film other than to show the contrast between happy little elves and reality, so I don't think this is something I will try myself, but I do feel that the latter part of the title sequence captures the mood and tone of the story very well.

Couldn't find the video. Sad times

I feel that the mood and atmosphere is captured mostly through the use of colour, or in this case the lack of it. The colour pallet consists of very dull, grim colours that are related to things such as dismay, dingy areas, gloom, depressing things, etc. It also implies a serious tone to the story as, there is a lack of 'happy' bright colours that would suggest a more relaxed, playful and cheerful environment. Overall, I feel that the atmosphere created through the use of colour can be very effective and I'd like to experiment with creating moods through the us of colour within my own work. I feel creating a mood board would be beneficial to me.