Planes on a boat: a cinematic seduction to have the film take proper flight, courtesy of the director (RIP).The opening sequence of TOP GUN stands out as a liminal masterpiece, leading us resolutely from a handful of over-salted popcorn in a darkened room, to the make-believe world of its heavy handed commercial and homoerotic film franchise. It is one of the most direct technical examples of an implicit structure that brings us step-by-step away from our own ordinary reality, while simultaneously pulling us towards the highly produced and fabulated realm of the film’s universe. And although no one wants to be first in putting TOP GUN and Shakespeare into the same sentence, the opening of Henry V does follow a similar logic: the chorus’ prologue asks us, point blank, to use our imagination to supplement limitations of a theatrical stage:“O for a Muse of fire, that would ascendThe brightest heaven of invention,A kingdom for a stage, princes to actAnd monarchs to behold the swelling scene!And let us, ciphers to this great accompt,On your imaginary forces work.”That was always the goal: please imagine what you see as real. Even if it is just one pale stage-hand dressed as a horse to represent a fierce cavalry attack: we, the audience, must allow the ciphers (the actors) to bring to life the play’s great account by letting them work our imagination.Early intro-credits preceding TOP GUN were less concerned with bridging from one world to another. 1890–1910 was largely technical: name of the film, and maybe the filmmaker. Moving images were enough to be excited about. When productions swelled and large studios took hold, more money-people needed credits, and the studio needed to be recognized as a brand. But still, when the MGM lion roared, the audience was already motivated, focused and ready to throw themselves into the make-believe world of the silver screen.In 1939 the film Gone with the Wind opens with epic music and sweeping footage of bucolic vistas to set the stage for a highly romanticized version of the old south. This was seminal. The door to a new language had been opened. It makes sense that this came first for historical dramas that needed context, and with Lawrence of Arabia (1962) and Doctor Zhivago (1965) a model that used opening credits to introduce a collage of theme and tone was firmly set. Again, the liminal mechanics lead the way: a Kuleshovian montage of curated abstractions to open our minds as a stage for “ciphers”. Access to a specific part of our imagination is the voice of the chorus: gradually teaching us of what is relevant — a language for the film-universe to imagine as ours, and real, until the end-credits roll.Then television happened as cultural furniture in living rooms filled with consumers — and it all needed repeatable and efficient intros to stand out, even call out that it is time for the family to gather. It needed ongoing attention. And cinema auteurs soon needed to protect their own domain. Directors started to challenge the film studios for ownership of defining signature. And so the world got more complicated, more distracted and distinctly more post-modern.We got an iconic era of Saul Bass (Psycho, Vertigo) and Pablo Ferro (Dr. Strangelove with a hand drawn typeface and a visual opening of a B-52 refueling mid-air as a sexual act, scored to an instrumental version of Try a little tenderness. This was Stanley Kubrick’s own “Hello, and welcome”, not the studios, suggesting a very different narrative worth telling about the prospect of war: a must see in the comparative context of TOP GUN!Record covers saw a similar evolution: Sticky Fingers and Velvet Underground by Andy Warhol, George Condo for Kanye West, and Basquiat for the album “Beat Bop” (1983), to mention some. It situated the product in a contemporary art world and in more active dialogue with the commercial machine it had become part of. Outside of Jean Luc Godard, intro credits on the whole never did take the opportunity to make the leap into high art. Nor did it see its craft as a political instrument. Instead, it slid into a domesticated and loyal patronage to hone its artisanal skills.Kyle Cooper’s title sequence for David Fincer’s “Se7en” (1995) broke the lull and again put the ambition and possibilities of credits in focus. Yes, from a liminal perspective, Cooper’s curated display as a cabinet of curiosities for the meticulous and nefarious administration of pain and evil does set the stage and our frame of mind brilliantly for the film to come. But the credits never become part of the film. Once the opening is done, the sequence makes an abrupt editorial cut to the distinct wide New York city establishing shot — the art of the sequence was kept separate from the enterprise of the film.Current television credits work within its own framework and serve a different format. Some are obvious: an episode of TV is a repeat business, less of an event and more in the realm of entertainment maintenance. Episodes are shorter than a film and credits therefore need to take less space, and, with the contemporary aim of binge watching, we now often have the option of skipping credits all altogether. The latter makes sense from an experience point of view. We are already inside the story universe, and interrupting with credits that we have already seen would be counter to the idea of immersion. But one might ask how the transition from one episode to the next couldn’t be done with less technical interface. Could it not instead offer a true intermezzo between two separate episodes to refresh and prepare our minds for the next installment. Like a tiny cup of champagne sorbet between courses to help us enjoy the next meal to its fullest and most alert. If, of course, that is what we want in viewers.Relevant television examples that don’t borrow from film to lend it artistic credibility are the opening montages of HBO’s Six Feet Under, True Blood as well as perhaps the best of them all, Tom Twyker’s haunting orchestral plunge through a kaleidoscope of 1930s Germany leading us into the bare world of Babylon Berlin. Its narrative brilliance is a musical and visual curation of the more interesting existential abstractions as canvas, encasing what inevitably will be plot-driven episodes designed to run for several seasons, no matter how sincere the ambition.With this bridging lens on opening sequences, there is one film that brilliantly showcases these mechanics and relentlessly plays all strings step-by-step of the liminal arch with apex rigor: the aforementioned but otherwise forgettable Tony Scott film: Top Gun.Here we go, the ticket is torn. Everyone is seated, pop-corn in hand and as house lights dim and we start to fall into the screen ahead. The darkness around us is filled with a slow bass beat. Obligatory studio logos and headliner credits march confidently to the score, simple utilitarian text on monochrome background. Someone has done the basic homework for us and without losing a beat we are given real world cliff-notes for what TOP GUN is: “the program was created to insure the top 1% of Navy pilots receive training in the lost art of aerial combat.” The correct word of course should be “ensure”, but with a grand and patient build of patriotic music underneath prompter-style typography, we are certainly promised nothing less than pompous and anthemic. We don’t care about spelling and are likely already lost to the ambition of the whole thing. As a matter of fact, not caring about spelling and grammar is the whole point — just like the prologue for Henry V suggests.We still only have text on black. We get both the “facts” about production and the “real world” portrayed, all placed in the same sparse aesthetic frame. Both are in the same cinematic context by being on screen with music together. It’s a liminal step from here and now, to there and now, and it is gentle as an aircraft carrier.Then it is time to introduce the moving image. Again, in a mastery of subtle bridging, we gently transition from literal fact, to the visual facts that is the world of navy pilots and the production that surrounds them — detailed telephoto lens shots of the deck crew getting ready in the twilight of the day (liminal!). The first imagery is grainy, and the muted color palette is tight to stay elevated, to be abstract, and unspecific. More close-cropped shots of naval machinery and people, treated as one. It is steel, bombs and fossil fuels making sweet love to the environment for American safety — and it’s just cinema, so more explanation than that would be a distraction. The opening mirrors the audience’s level of liminal suspension, with each new edit as a puzzle piece teasing us further into the full universe of front-line preparedness.Think Kenny Loggins with apex yacht rock.And it keeps going. There is still no indication that the actual story has started yet. More credits roll, more detailed shots but now the tempo in score and edit is picking up, and the fighter jets as a proxy for story, now lined up, and ready for take off. The music swells and ramps, ready to burst, the director’s own title is timed perfectly with a jet engine coming to life in glorious full blast. Action! It’s an explosion. And the music — along with us — are brought closer to the film’s relative specificity of its fictionality: glimpses of real faces, silhouettes of pilots and three-two-one-go! With yacht rock emeritus Kenny Loggins leading the way to “Highway to the Danger Zone”: and so, now we also know where we are going.Take off! And with the camera going airborne with planes, we leave the armor plated foreplay and gain altitude. At altitude, the carrier below sits heavy and minding its own business, a mothership nursing planes as they come and go. The teleprompter text takes us to “present time” — the film itself — and the rather nonspecific location of the third largest water mass in existence is noted as: “Indian Ocean”. It really should have read as “somewhere in the Indian Ocean”: to hit home that the film’s universe isn’t concerned with specific geo-political locations, or anything of why billions of dollars of US equipment is bopping around abroad in the first place. Somewhere could have placed us even more accurately in the suspension we are asked for in this prologue: a space where action never hesitates in the face of incoherence.Otherwise it’s perfect. The flawless and old school edit brings text credits, movements, music, and soon, the story into one surehanded and singular voice. And with it, us. It’s a 4-minute and 10-second study in the raw mechanics of liminality. One reality — the noisy street we came from, the cinema itself, our bodies, our transactional, situational and obligatory — all now transitioned and transcended into its Top Gun equivalent.The opening sequence takes us from what is, to what might be: each obstacle to silver screen immersion is mercenarily flipped by a more attractive one situated in the universe where we now should be focusing all our attention. It seamlessly lifts our reality to abstraction, and then brings it back down again to the realm of the film with gradual specificity. As smooth as a battleship can be. All we need now is for something bad to happen — the inciting incident — to set the narrative in motion. And that is exactly what happens next as we do a hard cut to the command center and radar station picking up “boogies” where international airspace is obviously only meant for America. Must, kill, enemy.One wants to end it there on a high note, but we do have to cover briefly how the sequel — Top Gun, Maverick — follows all of this up. The opening scene is mimicking its predecessor precisely. Shot by shot. But it is not right to call it identical. The typeface is updated. The introduction to what Top Gun is now includes a reference to both men and women. And the spelling of “ensure” has been corrected. It’s perhaps the best part of the opening credits: warning us that everything this time around has been corrected and transactionalized.The new opening is shorter, and the similar montage of sun rising over the deck crew getting the fighter-jets ready lacks the muted creamy brown and yellow image and low resolution grain and grit that made the first one sing to glue the other edits together. It had abstraction. Now, images are crisper and the edit perfunctory, lacking any voice. It’s marches dumbly forward for the franchise, above all simply trying to not fuck it up.And, to rub salt in the wound, Mavrick’s opening sequence is not seen as an opportunity for gradual bridging from our world to that of the film’s, but a mere nostalgic prefix to be cut abruptly. When, at the end of the opening sequence, we would be about to start the actual story — and this is the most important edit space to inhabit sincerely for true editorial liminality — this overproduced sequel, unlike its original, makes a hard switch to a completely different location. A completely different place and universe where a celebrity in silhouette takes his shirt off.The magic has been devoured by the franchise machine and all is fumbled before we even started. Just like the erotism of the first film’s iconic volleyball scene, now in the sequel, it is replaced by straight caucasians throwing balls at each other in wet sand. The real battle for immersion has been lost to a half a billion dollars of production, staging a fake war where no imaginary forces were ever drafted. It was indeed ill-advised to try to put Shakespeare’s Henry V and that airplane film in the same context.Johan LiedgrenFounder of think tank The Liminal Circle. Award-winning film-director, writer and consultant working with media and technology companies on liminal and narrative strategy for product design. www.liminalcircle.com / http://www.liedgren.com / https://medium.com/@johan_liedgrenThe liminal design of opening sequences, Top Gun and Henry V was originally published in UX Collective on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.