William Lebeda by Ali Khan
William Lebeda
William Lebeda is an animator, director, and graphic designer who has been in the industry of entertainment since the early 1990s. He joined Picture Mill in 1995, the year it was founded, and has designed and directed projects for motion pictures, advertising agencies, and television. ID Magazine named him both the best and worst title designer in their ID Forty list in 2003. The two projects were Signs for M. Night Shyamalan and Panic Room for David Fincher. He also directed the 2nd unit for M. Night Shyamalan’s The Happening in 2007. Lebeda has been the creative supervisor on the titles for Drag Me To Hell, Sky High, All Good Things, and many other feature films. Today, he is currently the creative director of Picture Mill in Hollywood, California. Other movies he worked on include Max Payne, I, Robot, and Hollow Man.
The way Lebeda implements type in Max Payne, for example, he gives the typeface the material/texture of a gun or bullets. The red for every second word is also the same color for the bullets in the sequence. But the most creative has to be when they show the main title of the movie, Max Payne, and animate the motion of a gun going off. This is one of the best ways to see typography greatly incorporated in a sequence.
In I, Robot, we see the text playing a part by acting as bubbles. The way they transform and also with the sound effects added. The color in this sequence also plays a huge part because it helps illustrate being underwater, and the red in the beginning symbolizes danger.
Lebeda does a great job in creating a sequence for Panic Room. He doesn’t just add type to different shots of buildings. He plays with their positions, and most importantly, the perspective. He adds the type in the same perspective as of how the building is facing the camera, which is both genius and well implemented. Which probably explains why he was on the list of one of the best title designers.
The movie Sign, however, is a totally different story. It’s just awful. Like no thought was really put into it. It’s just text fading in and out with no movement and a boring low-saturated radial gradient of blue.