Production company logo

Initial designs and ideas

For this practical task, we were asked to make a production company logo ourselves. Each person in the group was to make their own, and then we would decide on the best one and use this in our final coursework piece.

Some names I originally came up with relating to our 'Slasher horror' genre were the following:

• SOS Productions
• Unnerving Pictures
• Obsessed 
• Slaughter Productions

I thought that the best name was 'Slaughter Productions' as I felt that this related the most to the genre, as it is quite a gruesome and horrible word. I also felt that this would allow me to create an original logo, seeing as it is not too specific to one particular item/idea such as chopping or hitting. 

I also had multiple ideas for the logo itself:

• A butcher's knife coming down to cut a piece of meat
• Burning paper or leaves (as this is slaughtering nature)
• Cutting down branches or flowers (for the same reason)

My favourite idea was the burning of leaves as I felt this would be the easiest to film but still look effective at the same time.

Production

I filmed the leaves burning on my iPhone. I used a tripod with a clip which I used to hold my iPhone, as this would prevent the shaking that would have occurred if I was holding the camera with my hands. 

I collected some dry leaves and tried burning them to see how well they would burn. I burned one without doing any preparation type thing to ensure good burning. This didn't work very well, so I got the next leaf and put it in the oven on a low temperature for a few minutes to dry it out further. This burned slightly better, but I wanted the leaves to kind of explode into flames, and this leaf burned slowly and steadily. I then got some white spirit and poured it (very carefully) onto the next leaf and threw a match onto it. This gave me the desired effect burning wise as as soon as it caught, it burned very well, but the explosive effect wasn't very apparent. I decided I'd use a fire starter which you put on fires so they start faster, as these tend to have an 'explosive' type effect. 

When filming, I began by having a pile of dead, dry leaves with a crumbling, old and dirty wall as the background. I poured white spirit onto the leaves and put a fire starter under the leaves.

I then dropped some extra leaves on top to create a naturalistic, autumnal effect. After this I threw some matches on top as well to begin the burning. The leaves took a while to catch, but when they did they burned very well and made quite a large fire. I decided that I could edit out some of the time it took for the leaves to catch to make it seem more explosive.

When I watched it back, I realised there were a lot of 'natural sounds' in the background, such as cars going past and leaves blowing around and loud sounds, as well as the crackling and burning of the leaves of course. I thought if I edited and manipulated them, they would add to the creepiness of the clip that I was going for.

Post production

In post production, I cut the clip into 4 pieces: the first one where the leaves and the match was thrown onto the first pile of leaves,  the second where there was a loud noise in the background as the leaves were catching on fire, the third just of the leaves crackling and burning and the fourth just of burning but with strange, distorted noises in the background from the wind etc. I did this so that I could separately edit the sounds in the videos.

I tried the different effects of the clips with good background noises, but I didn't particularly like the effect they gave. In the end, I just amplified the volume of the loud noise in the second clip and left the fourth clip as it was, as I thought the sounds were creepy enough as they were.

I then added the title 'Slaughter Productions' with the drifting effect, and changed the font colour to red to represent fire and blood, and the font to 'Cracked' and the size to 144. I didn't like both of the lines having the same font, so changed the bottom line to 'Lucida' size 72 and bold, and kept the top line in 'Cracked' and the size to 144 in regular. However i didn't like the red as it kind of blended with the fire from the leaves, so changed it to white and much preferred this. I put the text to appear for 7 seconds on the screen, and it exits just before the end of the clip whilst strange sounds begin.

Overall I'm very pleased with my clip, and I love the way the editing and filming turned out. Here is the final clip.