Creating a production company intro sequence

The first completed draft of my production company intro:

 

How I made it:

I began by noting common motifs of film noir, the genre we would like our opening to be in. Swinging lights seemed like a very obvious one, that seemed simple enough for me to do. I researched how to go about it, as I have little knowledge of detailed video effects. I found this tutorial. The tutorial was designed for After Effects, but the basic principle could easily be transferred to any video editing software. My group has not yet decided our production company name, so I am using the placeholder "Rouge Films".

 

Making the background:

I used Paint.NET for the background, as it is free, fairly versatile, and I have used it for several years and am therefore very familiar with it. I started with a free to use brick texture I found. There was some slight color variation on the bricks, so I applied the sepiatone filter to make everything monochrome, in true film noir fashion. I then used an overlay layer to create some lighting effects, so that the wall didn't seem so bright and flat. I also cropped it to standard video dimensions (1080p). I applied a combination of the oil painting filter and a noise filter (with motion blur) to create a film grain effect.

I searched for 50s style fonts, and found a list of suggestions. Out of them, I chose one that was nice and clear and bold, but also a serif font as it is more appropriate for a gritty genre. The font is Rockwell.

The plain black text stood out too much, but I didn't want to add more textures, as I think it should remain simple. Instead, I copied the same texture as the background, increasing the brightness slightly and adding a drop shadow (using a duplicate text layer but in black and applying a blur) to make it legible.

Once I was content, I exported the text and the background as separate images to then import into my preferred video editing software, Adobe Premiere Pro CS6. I scaled everything to fit the frame and then I applied the lighting effect.

I adjusted the ambient lighting to be very dark, as this makes for a better reveal. I also changed the spotlight colour to a yellow-brown colour to seem darker and more reflective of the genre. Now came the most difficult part, creating a natural motion of a swinging light.

I couldn't find a sound effect of a light swinging, so I tried to find some suitable creaking noises. I ended up with the first second of this sound clip.

 Here is a work in progress, where I have not yet added the text.

 

 I used what I knew about animation and what I'd learnt about the motion of a pendulum in physics to determine the key frames of the motion of the light. Being able to apply this knowledge from my other subjects was quite surprising. The keyframes are timed and spaced according to the maximum and minimum of a swinging pendulum. The only sound in the clip was the creaking, and this seemed somewhat unsettling, so I added some 1950's style jazz music to imply gritty film noir rather than horror. I made the fade out for the text longer than the fade for the background to draw more attention to it.

 

In conclusion, I am quite happy with the result, but I think the colours of the final product are too yellow, and I would maybe change it to be less saturated, perhaps changing it to grayscale instead of sepia, which doesn't appear to work very well in this context.

I'm very happy with the lighting effect, and most of the swinging motion, but despite my efforts to animate it naturally, I had difficulty with the last half a second of it or so, as I needed it to stop swinging in a reasonable amount of time, however this made it appear somewhat stiff.

Production Company Intro Deconstruction : Castle Rock Entertainment

Deconstruction of a professional production company logo:

Castle Rock Entertainment is a professional production company founded in 1987 by Martin Shafer, Rob Reiner, Andrew Scheinman, Glenn Padnick and Alan Horn. The company mostly produces comedy films, usually in the romantic comedy sub-genre. This includes films such as "Chaos Theory"(2008) and "Did You Hear About the Morgans?"(2009).

The video starts completely black before a light appears. This light is, at first the only thing visible. There is bright, gentle piano music. The use of moving lights to reveal objects is a common motif in our preferred genre, film noir. With some scenery changes, such as making the light source a swinging lamp, and changing the motion of the light, it would be an effective method of revealing the name of our production company.

The intro fades in with the scene remaining very dark. This creates a silhouette effect, especially contrasted with the bright light of the sun rising behind it. The focal point, the lighthouse, is located in the middle instead of offset, creating a very striking image. A violin plays parallel with the rising sun.

The logo is revealed as a silhouette as the light shines on it, and transitions to white as the light moves away and disappears, leaving the logo behind. The logo itself is a thin serif font, with the letters C and K appearing as sort of book ends to the whole piece.

This production company intro is interesting, and I have found some techniques and effects that could be relevant to my own intro, but overall, I think its themes are too dissimilar to my own.

Deconstruction of a school production company logo

The logo itself is a sans serif, block like font. It is all one colour and has no effects such as drop shadows or wear and tear, making it appear somewhat out of place against the cityscape backdrop, which has a pencil-like quality to it.

The cityscape appears in sections. It flickers slightly before moving on to the next section. This combined with the dark background and faint buzzing noise creates the effect of an old neon sign. Neon signs are a common motif of the 1950s, and a similar effect to this could be used for our production logo.

Production Company Intro Deconstruction: Focus Features

Focus Features

      
Information:

• Focus Features International was created  in 2002.
• The genre of films it produces is sci-fi, horror and action.
• Some of the most recent films include: Suffragette(2015), The Black Sea (2015), The Theory of Everything (2014), The Box Trolls (2014) and That Awkward Moment (2014)

Production Company Intro

The intro begins with fading in a background of several unfocused circles which are flattened lens flares.The circles are become smaller as they begin to zoom out slowly. The main colours shown are blue and orange/brown.

We then see the 'FOCUS FEATURES' fade in on top of the background in the colour yellow. As the background appears a short sound of strings is added and then this is repeated as the writing appears.

The 'O' in 'FOCUS' is blurred to echo the background. This allows an emphasis on the title as all the other letters are in 'focus'. The blurred background also allows the audience to see the logo clearly as the focused letters contrast with the background. The bright yellow adds to the visibility of the logo. The logo is in Sans Serif. 

This then fades to black as the production company intro ends.

School production company deconstruction

As the smoke moves across the screen from left to right each of the letters appears. This is a simple effect but still looks professional. The font used is Sans Serif. The white font contrasts with the black background this would be good for film noir as they are normally in black and white. Smoke is also often used in the film noir genre.

The length of the production company intro is 8 seconds long. Therefore, the audience won't get bored. There is no music or sound to accompany the intro but this also allows for tension to build up which fits in with the horror genre. The name 'Exposure' also links with the horror genre. Exposure means having no protection from something that may cause harm in the horror genre this would be the killer. Therefore, when we create our production company the name should link with our film noir genre. 

Deconstruction of professional film production company

Deconstruction of New Line Cinema Production

Research into professional companies give us insight into what sort of existing film distribution companies would produce and market.

New line cinemas, is a subsidiary of the Warner Bros  film production company. 

History 

The company was founded in 1967 and has continued to thrive for around forty years.

 

In 2008 they became a unit of the Warner Bros entertainments with the intention of increasing their film performance and co-ordinate functions, although they keep all production and business affairs separate. 

Highest grossing films and most recent films 

Since 2008 after their alliance with Warner Bros entertainment, they went through a successful period when they released The Lord of the Rings, The Hobbit trilogy and the Conjuring. 

Their most recent famous films are:

• Hot Pursuit (2015)
• San Andreas (2015)
• The Hobbit: battle of the five armies (2014)
• Annabelle (2014). 

Genre

The genre of films New line Cinema produce are broad as they have explored different films genres, from romantic comedies to many sub-genres of horrors.

 

Therefore it makes sense for the production company introduction to be generic and not be genre specific. However, the majority of the films that they have produced have been horrors.

Deconstruction

What I thought was effective about the standard introduction for New Line Cinemas was it's simplicity, which can be generalised to many over many genres.  

Lighting

A low-key lighting, coming from one source emulates the lighting of a film projector, which shines from behind a film reel ribbon. Thus generates an old cinematic feel, which makes this non-genre specific as all films are intended for the cinema.      

Typography

The logo is a combination of text and a main image. The text is a capitalised "NEW LINE CINEMA" that is white with serif font. This makes it stand out on a dark background and clearly focuses in on the "NEW LINE CINEMA", also the use of serif font tells us that this is an old company which it is, enhancing the old cinematic theme.       

Logo

The appropriate use of black the film reel ribbon goes well with the old cinematic projector theme. The centre consists of a rectangle with two film rolls on either side, the second roll to the left is diagonally slanted at the top. The whole thing is lit by a bright blue shadow coming from behind the rectangle and rolls, this makes it stand out and ensures that it does not fade into the black and so making it stand out.     

Sound          

High pitched, classical, stringed music accompanies the introduction which establishes a traditional film production company, rather than using a modern sound track or other sound effects, which would suggests a more modern and newly formed film company.        

Variations: Final Destination 3



 Effectiveness for Genre: Supernatural/Slasher horror cult film

• Changing in variations of smoky reds, orange, yellows then purples colours gives off the image of fire and danger.
• ominous and slow music, generates tension and a sense of impending doom.
• The film rolls are shiny, giving off an metallic appearance, suggesting an industrial environment setting and a violent element to the film.         

Evaluation

New Line  Cinema Production company has a wide range genres which they have explored in their cinematic productions, and have no one key established genre in which they exclusively cater to. This enabled them to maximise creative opportunities in the film industry, and create films of any genre, including film noir.         

SE7EN Timeline

I broke down the opening credits of SE7EN in to a timeline, to make each part easier to evaluate. There is a screenshot, time and short description for every appearance of text.

Se7en Opening Credits Deconstruction

Deconstruction - 'Se7en' Opening Credits

Analysis

Despite being a horror film and therefore not relevant to our focused genre of film noir, the ‘Se7en’ opening credits have provided inspiration for our coursework.

Inspiration

I particularly liked the first shot in the opening where the camera is focused on the book with the unfocused hands in the background as this created a sense of mystery and anonymity surrounding the main character and intrigues the viewer to find out more. I found the constant changing of the shot’s subject interesting as gave us an insight into the complexity of the killers mind as they obviously think about every small detail and are quite smart. For example, they went as far as to cover fingerprints by literally removing them with a blade.

All these small details inspired ideas about my own project – film noir focuses on detective work, and detectives are likely to want to cover their tracks. The editing was also good and made me think about how we could incorporate glitches and flashes like are used here, however I don’t think this would be genre appropriate for film noir.

Effect

The trailer creates quite a gritty effect, as all the shots have dark lighting with lots of shadows, and the glitching creates tension and unease. The fast paced editing both puts viewers on edge and draws them in, as many small snippets of the killer’s obsession are shown without giving away any major details. Scratchy writing is also used, as well as the colour red to represent blood.

One technique that’s used is synecdoche, which is where a whole entity is referred to by only part of the body. In this case, the killer’s hands are constantly shown but not any other part of the body. This is possibly referring to the people he’s killed because he uses his hands for this, so by showing only his hands he is reduced down to simply just a killer. The hands are also mostly shown through shadows, which emphasises the mystery of his identity.

Practical Task - Filters

The most obvious option and most common in terms of filters for film noir movies is a monochrome filter. This is best for traditional film noir movies set in the 1940s or 1950s. This can be seen in this screenshot of "The Man Who Wasn't There", set in late the 1940s. However, with the rise of "neo-noir" movies, other editing techniques have been used, such as sepiascale (use of browns instead of a black to white scale), this example being from the opening scene of "Gangster Squad". Also in "Gangster Squad", I found examples of footage where the colour is not completely monochrome, but highly undersaturated. For my test footage to experiment with these filters, I am using the video we made for our preliminary task.

I found this tutorial series on using Adobe After Effects to make clips resemble film noir movies. I already have After Effects on my home computer, albeit a fairly old version, so I thought it would be a good idea to try and use it on our video.

I immediately had issues as many of the options the tutorial told me to use were according to the layout on the newer versions, meaning I had to spend time attempting to find what he was talking about using trial and error.

Following the tutorial exactly did not result in the effect I was looking for. It's far too dark.

I attempted to use the "dust and scratches" effect on after effects to make the video appear more old and weathered, like an old film, but for some reason, despite having a fairly good graphics card on my computer, I had trouble rendering it. I couldn't get the effect to play in the end, so I settled for a static noise layer.

I figured out how to adjust the saturation of the video, and reduced it greatly to resemble traditional film noir. I also changed the colours in the gradient the tutorial instructed me to create to shades of brown, in an attempt to imitate the effect in "Gangster Squad".

 

This turned out to be fairly effective, and I can definitely consider using it for our final piece.

Se7en Opening Credits Timeline

Timeline of titles 

This is a timeline of all the titles that appear in the opening credits of psychological horror film 'Se7en'. I have included the role of the people, the text written on screen, the time at which the text appears and what kind of background (image or plain black) they appear on.

Although our chosen genre isn't horror, I feel like this task has been beneficial as it has allowed me to see the duration of the titles on screen and what kind of times they appear. I've found that the actors tend to be shown first in order of most to least important, followed by some key members of the production team. This is possibly done to catch viewer's attention as they are most likely to recognise the names of the lead actors, so may be more excited.

Se7en opening credits timeline

Se7en opening credit timeline

During class time we were introduced to the idea of opening credits of Se7en, which I have deconstructed and have made a timeline for, showing all the times there are names and roles of people involved in the production of the film.

Conclusion

I found that being introduced to a good opening credit sequence, gave our group the opportunity to consider another option that we could do for our group practical filming. I learnt that as long as we use appropriate roles and titles, effective motifs and editing that relates to our genre, we can achieve a successful opening title sequence. 

               

     

SE7EN Inspiration

Inspiration

The shots used in the opening credits were extreme close ups of objects and fingers. Therefore, creating an enigma as the person who owns all these items remains unknown to the audience. Extreme close ups could be used in our project as not too many details are given away such as where this person is.

Many of the shots are dark and set in low key lighting to give a tone of darkness and mystery, with the main colours being black and white. A red light is shown developing photos. The use of red suggests blood and connotes a sense of danger. The colours used are very important as they can help to set the mood of a scene so this is a factor we need to consider when filming our own project. The colour could be changed by using a filter.

Lots of different angles and cuts are used to create a jittery effect adding to the eeriness. The pace quickens and the shots become shorter towards the end of the opening credits to build up tension.

Many props are also used to give an indication of what is going to happen in the film and they help to set the scene. Many of the props used in the Se7en trailer are images of victims and religious items such as the Bible. Therefore, props would be good to use in our project.


Overall, from the opening credits I was inspired to use different filters when editing our final project to create different colours to change the mood of a scene. We also need to use a black and white filter to fit in with the film noir genre. I also liked the use of close up shots as you can see specific details. In the SE7EN example the close ups also allow us to see his fingers which are dirty and we can also read what is on the screen allowing the audience to see a connection with the Bible (a religious symbol) instead of having a long shot of random text. The jittery editing would be good to use if we can use it to fit in with film noir genre as it is more common in the horror genre.

Inspiration: SE7EN Opening Credits

Inspiration:

The part I found most interesting about this clip was the use of super close-up shots and obscure lighting. The use of these close ups allowed small hints towards the nature of the character, without giving too much away. For our film opening, we'd like to produce a Film Noir opening, so the mysterious tone set by the vague hints would help set the scene.

The use of silhouettes is also very effective in the same way, by hinting towards what is happening without being obvious. I also think these shots are very visually interesting, and I think it would be good to try and create something similar using film noir- themed objects for our project. It would make identifying the character in the shots very difficult. This is a very enigmatic piece that uses human curiosity to its advantage.

In this shot, a video is overlaid atop another one and which is upside down, this creates an interesting distorted mirror effect, which could tie into themes of inner reflection or introspect of a character. This is also something that could be applied to our project.

Deconstructing these opening credits has given me ideas about how to create an enigma using lighting and camera angles, that may be useful in our own film opening. The use of these techniques to create such a strong theme is definitely something I want to consider.

SE7EN Timeline

I created a timeline of the opening sequence of SE7EN. This included the times of when text appeared and what the text said. This enabled me to see what order the names of certain people involved in the production appeared so that we can use a similar order in our project.






Overall, I learnt that the names only appeared once and only specific roles were shown including:

• Who the music/casting/editing was done by
• Costume creator
• Production designer
• Directors
• Producers
• Writers

Therefore, because there are only four people in my group we may have to create names to fit all the different roles so that everyone's name only appears once.

Practical Task- Lighting

Inspiration

For inspiration I looked at the film ‘Gangster Squad’ and a YouTube video,shown below,to see how to create different lighting effects in the film noir genre. Lots of low-key lighting and shadows were used as well as contrasts between bright and dark lighting.

Practical Task

Whilst watching Gangster squad I saw that in some shots there was a contrast between the lighting in the background and foreground. The background was normally bright whilst the foreground was dark. This created a silhouette of the character enabling them to remain unknown. 

I then tried to create a similar image myself. I waited until it was dark outside and decided to place a bear on a windowsill whilst the lights inside were turned on. This then allowed me to make the contrast between the lighting creating a silhouette, showing only a faint outline of some details on the bear.

Our group also wanted to try an interrogation scene where there would be a light swinging above the characters. For further inspiration I looked at an interrogation scene from the film Nightcrawler.

This clip showed the two characters sitting at a table with one light directly above the table making the scene dimly lit. This type of lighting means that the two characters sitting at the table are bright, to create a focus on them, whilst their surroundings are dark. I then tried to recreate this lighting.

I used my phone torch as this was a white light often seen in interrogation scenes. As I could not hang my phone from the ceiling I had to hold it. Therefore, I had to set the camera on timer and place it on the floor so that I could hold the light up. Consequently, the angle of the photo was not how I wanted it.

I also tried to shine the torch more towards one character so it was obvious as to who was getting interrogated as seen in the photo above. In Gangster Squad they used the lighting to clearly define the features on one side of the characters face whilst the other side remained in the darkness. This lighting was used to show the villain whereas the hero would have been shown in full light.

I then looked at a YouTube video to see how they created this effect. The video showed a bright light being shone onto one side of the character. I then recreated this lighting in my own photo showing one side of the bear whilst the other side is in the dark.

Finally, I looked at shadows which are common in film noirs. I found that shining the light on the right of the bear created a shadow on the left and by shining the light on the left side a shadow was created on the right. By shining the light directly in front of the bear a shadow would also appear in front of the bear.

Evaluation

In the future I would make sure that we could hang the light up during the interrogation scene or have at least two people filming the scene. This would then enable us to get better camera angles. I also found it hard to recreate some of the effects due to not having professional lighting,