Our '100 Productions' Ident

Written by Reeve:

For our film opening, I made a custom ident from scratch featuring the logo made by Mohamed.

For our ident and the 'animation' or appearance it may have, I decided to pay homage to the 1968 film 'Bullitt', which had an interesting animated ident for 'Warner Bros. Seven Arts' as shown below:

I felt that it would be fairly easy to incorporate the 'semi-animated' style of this opening. As the Warner Bros. Ident has a 'W7' symbol being 'drawn' in the shield to make the full logo, and the rest of the logo fades in, with a delayed fade on the 'Presents', I could apply the 'drawing' effect to the '100' of the logo, which already looks handwritten to begin with, and have the camera shape and 'PRODUCTIONS' fade in, with some other 'Presents' text fading in afterwards. 

In order to get the '100' to have a 'drawing' effect, I had to use Adobe After Effects. With the help of YouTube and the college's technician, I learned that I had to use the 'pen' tool and click certain areas of the logo in a specific order, bending lines to match the shape, as well as the thickness of the line. I had to adjust the settings to 'Reveal Original Image', so that the image starts off not being visible, and the '100' becomes visible in the way I drew it (I can't explain things very well). The 'end' (it was actually slightly re-edited afterwards. We just don't have footage of that) result was this:

The end result ended up looking a bit sloppy, especially towards the end, but its not like I'm a professional. This was my first time even attempting to do an effect like this and for a first attempt, it came out sort of decently. Afterwards, I had to export the After Effects file into Premiere, to incorporate it over the skyline shot. I chopped the clip into 3 parts; one with only the '1' being drawn, another with just the '00' and simply just a portion with the complete '100'. They all lasted different lengths and had different speeds to add effect. The '1' was drawn fairly slowly, while the '00' was drawn faster (mainly to hide the sloppiness). The third part was meant to last the length of the rest of the ident. I made the 'PRODUCTIONS' and 'camera' fade in after the 100 was complete, and the 'PRESENTS' would fade in slightly after. The timeline of the ident will be shown below:



The 'final' version of the ident will be displayed below: