Pablo Ferro

Yesterday I watched a rough cut from Marianna Milhorat‘s new film and we had a discussion about beginnings / entries / openings.

After thinking about opening sequences and title credits later in the afternoon my mind started to wonder to the work of Pablo Ferro, a self taught animator. Ferro created numerous opening credits for feature films throughout the years but the work that stands out the most for me is his trailer for Stanley Kubrick’s Dr. Strangelove or : How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the Bomb (1964). Kubrick initially wanted to collaborate with Arthur Lipsett after seeing his powerful film Very Nice, Very Nice (1961), but Lipsett refused. After seeing Ferro’s advertisement work, Kubrick hired him to create the trailer for Dr. Strangelove. As Steven Heller states: “The black and white spot that Ferro designed for Dr. Strangelove employed his quick-cut technique — using as many as 125 separate images in a minute — to convey both the dark humor and the political immediacy of the film.”