Creating A Production Company Logo

For this group project, we felt we needed an identity or logo to represent our 'short film company'. We had already had a production meeting organizing and deciding on a name (Makley Productions) but we also felt a visual presentation of this identity would have been appropriate to include as a credit in our final piece.

We began looking into different film production companies, such as Paramount and 20^th Century Fox, for inspirations from their logos.

I found a video on YouTube that showed some of the company logo’s that we looked at.

After looking at these logos, we started planning our own. We first created our actual logo. We used a sans-serif tall white font. It did however contain a few interesting little details in the font that made it technically half sans-serif, half serif. We wanted to keep the logo simple, and thus we did.

We had some footage that we recorded during one of our 'camera testing' sessions, which was set on our school playground and focused on lots of seagulls in flight. We decided this would be a good piece of stock footage to use for an animated version of our logo, as it could be manipulated to look very professional easily.
I decided to take on the technical side of this process as well as some of the creative side.

During discussion of our design, I created a storyboard so I that I had knew what to work with and from. It stated information such as the times that certain visuals would be visible and what audio would be audible etc, the information given in these storyboards had to be quite concrete to ensure that I followed what the group had discussed and decided on. It also made sure I didn't get side-tracked or put in any other ideas that may have ended up not suiting the logo at all. However, the final product may not be 100% the same as my initial idea plan.

I began by creating a new project and importing the full raw footage into Sony Vegas Pro 12, a video editing program. By importing the raw footage, I had full access to every piece of footage I would or could need. I then cut and split through the video footage and found the clip that I needed for the logo.

The first step I took after this was to choose a frame in which the footage would freeze frame at, which meant I had to look for a clear frame rather than one that was blurred or inaccurate from the storyboards we made. However, I could not find the clear shot I needed that was in the same position as the one we had planned, so I had to improvise and find the nearest clear shot I could. It was on the opposite side of the screen but it still seemed appropriate luckily.

I then created an inverted mask on top of the video layer and created a circle that was set to follow and gradually shrinks on to the seagull. This circle would then freeze at the same time as when the freeze frame was placed.

I then had to take audio into account and apply some extra audio to the footage to make it seem more interesting and clear, as the raw footage's sound was extremely distorted, noisy and would have sounded very unprofessional. I downloaded some copyright-free source sounds from a website called http://soundbible.com. The sounds were simple wind noises which, in reality, could have been done easily by us, however we didn’t feel it necessary considering the easy access we had to the sounds otherwise. It also would have been a lot higher quality from another source.

We could however use the sounds of the seagull cries from our footage, however the cries that were from the particular clip we used had distortion and talking over them, so I had to venture back through the other pieces of footage to find different, clearer cries and move them to the section of visuals we were using.

I also wanted to add some background music to the piece just to add a little more drama and atmosphere to it all. I needed a music piece that was smooth, soothing and calm. I added a piece from the official soundtrack of a game called Clannad called 'Town, Flow of Time, People'. This piece suited the scene very well, it almost sounds like a soothing wind itself so it blended well with all the sound effects.

The next step involved generating text onto a new layer, above the footage,stating our company name; Makley Productions. I chose a sans-serif, tall, white font for the logo as it suited the idea of modern films, whereas a serif font with any other colour or look would have looked dated. The title had a kerning adjustment from the start of the clip to the end, making it move slightly. A fade transition was then applied to all layers; visual and audio to ensure a smooth exit of the clip.

And this is our final logo;

Posted in: Ideas, Production