A white dot blinks across the screen, from left to right. It settles on the far right-hand edge, then opens up to reveal the inside of a sniper’s gun barrel. The barrel follows the silhouette of James Bond as he walks across the white background.

Suddenly aware that he is being watched, Bond turns sharply, draws his own weapon and fires. A wash of red bleeds across the barrel and the dot falls to the bottom left of the screen, whereupon it fades away.

This was the graphically simple, conceptually ambitious idea that Maurice Binder presented to film executives Harry Saltzman and Albert R Broccoli in 1961, during the making of the first James Bond movie. “It was something I did in a hurry because I had to get to a meeting with the producers in 20 minutes,” Binder later explained.

“I just happened to have some little white price tag stickers and I thought I’d use them as gun shots across the screen. We’d have James Bond walk through and fire, at which point blood comes on screen. That was about a 20-minute storyboard I did, and they said, 'This looks great!’”

It was the genesis of what would become one of the defining elements of the world’s longest-running movie franchise. Binder’s opening titles for 1962’s Dr No were little more than an extended gun-barrel sequence. But, set to Monty Norman’s equally iconic Bond Theme music, it would set the foundations the most distinctive titles in cinematic history.