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.