Pre-Production: Opening sequence analysis and timeline

This films opening titles start at 3:00 and ends 5:40. A duration of 2 minutes 45 seconds.
The opening sequence shows a young, white, Scottish male travelling to Uganda. This is connoted by him spinning the globe and landing on Uganda. The opening follows him through his coach journey, we see a lot of scenery, the small villages and wildlife. We also see troops in trucks and tanks moving in the villages, he becomes friendly with a native woman and she tells him that they are good and fighting for the people. He sees President Mugabe for the first time and tries some local food. The young man and his new friend then have sex, after which he gets back on the coach and finishes his journey to Uganda.

This opening hints that there will be an involvement of the Ugandan Military/Government, with a focus on Mugabe. Also that there will be more sex and a love story intertwined.


Props:

• Coaches
• Tanks
• Trucks
• Luggage
• Simple costume
• Food

This Instituional logo is from the biggest co production company for the film and is a subsidary of 20th Century Fox. It uses the same kind of logo as it's parent company. It's rather intimidating and bold. The gold connotes wealth and status.

Titles

The typography is a bold, straight edged font, all capitalised, connoting control and dictation. The letters themselves are masking images behing them, all tinted red through to yellow. These images are of Uganan men and I think most of them are of President Mungabe as played by Forest Whitaker.

Open publication - Free publishing - More last king

Above is a timeline of every title shown in the opening sequence of The Last King of Scotland, showing timings and what each title says. What's interesting about this opening sequence is there is no mention of any crew, this is possibly because the Director, Kevin Macdonald, isn't that well known or maybe it was a personal choice of his! Either way this is quite strange given that there were 12 titles in total.
I really like the masking effect that they used on their titles, so you get the words but with images relevant to the film in the background, it's simple but very effective. I'll be looking in to that for my opening sequence. I like the timing of this films titles too. There are nice gaps which have been cleverly thought out. It's made me appreciate the importance of timing in titles.