Company Logo - Adding the ident

With the logo design, I wanted to create an image that could be associated with typical horror conventions which helps to assist with the eerie opening that we desired. I experimented with alternative options that were available to me i.e. the different websites that would have enabled me to produce an animated logo/ident. My aim was to be more time-efficient when producing the design, as oppose to over-complicating the process and end with an ident & logo that did not meet our expectations. At first, I followed a variety of ident tutorials that showed me the process of manipulating existing images and text and make them an animated feature. The source 'Blender' was a website that I downloaded in the hope that it would enable me to create an ident that was aesthetic and less time-consuming. After numerous attempts, I decided to abandon this source due to the complexity of the controls, and focussed on being innovative with the given sources that were available - and thus, this saved-time.

I then sketched out different images that had an association with a dark, ambient atmosphere. These images included photos of a bright moon, silhouettes e.g. of a wolf, mountain range & bats. I collated all these images together & over layered them on Publisher - a simplistic, efficient source that I was very familiar with and thus, this met my aim. After around twenty-minutes, I decided that I needed a way in which to animate the image, which was somewhat impossible using  the Microsoft document on its own. I wanted the transition in colours of the moon to be consistent with key connotations of the horror genre. Therefore, by using a red saturation (on publisher), this allowed this desired effect to enhance the imagery, which we believed to be effective. Moreover, the use of the wolf & night sky used as the background connotes the idea of a sinister, immoral and foreboding nature and thus, this reflects our eerie intention. Furthermore, I used 'textfont' to generate a variety of fonts that gave the production name a professional look. We decided that the use of a white font would stand out with better quality as oppose colours such as reds and blues, and this is a typical ident convention in other professional titles within institutions. 

After the collation of images was finished, and I had created two identical logos (one with a red moon, the other, grey), I exported the design via a memory pen which enabled me to animate the logo on Final Cut Pro the following day. I used a minimum amount of editing to create the animation effect and therefore contributed to how efficient I was (taking approx. 5 minutes). I used additional fades and blackouts to combine the two images together. As a result, this created the effect that the moon had changed colour from grey to a saturated red, further denoted by the production name. To finish, I explored various opening sounds via freesound with the search tag 'cinematic'. This allowed me to find specific replications and typical sounds used by institutions to overlay the ident and thus, this created a climax to the moving image. Moreover, I wanted to synchronise a howl in order to denote from the wolf silhouette in the ident and therefore, this added to the realism of the image and further forebodes the mystery.

Work by Dan Neary