ALFIE MOVIE TITLES.

 

 

 

I was approached by Lewis Gilbert film director to do the film titles for Alfie. He asked to come and watch the shooting the last sequence of the film which was with Michael Caine and dog walking across a bridge on the Thames, just as the sky was getting light at dawn and the length of the bridge from one end to the other was lit with a long row of studio lights.

He said if I could create a similar night - dusk mood in black and white stills, I had the job. I did a test shoot with my Nikon using Tri-X film at 1600 ASA using Acufine developer. I did some blow-ups and showed them to Lewis he liked them and I got the go ahead to shoot the titles in grainy b/w stills for Cinemascope

The concept of creating the titles was largely left up to me. I wanted to show the film stars against the city backgrounds with the lettering. There were no computers in those days so I decided to use the sandwich printing method. I went out and shot a number of night - dusk shots around London which had a lot of very dark to black areas, these came out as transparent on the negative. Then I got the cast and production crew into my studio and shot them on a black background. with the Tri-X film. I spent time in the darkroom positioning one negative over another, the portraits with the transparent background would come through the transparent areas of the city background showing both at the same time creating a surreal effect.

The next step was the lettering which had to be done in various sizes (percentages) depending on the contracts of the film stars. I asked an associate Harri Peccinotti who was the art director of Nova magazine to do the lettering with some old wooden blocks which he also used for type in Nova magazine.

The end result was I went to Twickenham Studios where we copied all the material on a rostrum camera. When Alfie first came out it was an instant and huge success and to this day is considered a cinema classic.