In constructing our production logo, we wanted to make it feel as urban and gritty as possible and thought about what images we should use to create this feeling. We firstly found an image that represented youth and a little bit of the stereotype of young people today, so opted for this of a teenage boy wearing a dark hoody, a cap and low-slung jeans.
We then modified this image on Photoshop, as we wanted it to be more striking and animated. We did this by quick selecting the different areas of the boy (ie. arm, face, hat etc) and then adding on colour overlays for each section. We chose to do this with the colour scheme of black, grey & white as this fitted in with the urban feel of our film, and also, we wanted to create a slightly menacing, faceless youth, whose grey face seems to represent that it is not always black or white when considering the issue of young people today. This also is in keeping with the main idea of our film.
After modifying the original picture of the boy, we also wanted to create a shadow that offered an idea of the boy's potential future if he chose the wrong path. To do this we created a shadow on Paint, as we found this easier to work with, and wanted it to look quite unreal and cartoonish.
We then looked to combine these two images using Photoshop, so that the shadow appeared as if from the boy.
After initially constructing the image, we then thought about a background that would offer something more than just plain black, so we chose to find a background that was representative of urban London and thought that a set of tower blocks would work well.
We wanted to change this background though and added a Threshold filter to create a grittier feel. We then smoothed this out to help it blend in. We did this on Motion and I will discuss how we animated the logo next.
Using Motion we were able to work with the different layers of our production logo to create a dynamic piece of animation that we felt represents our brand identity, style & content very well. We wanted to have a sinister, edgy feel to the logo, so chose a font that represented this called Bearpaw. We found this free font online, downloaded it and added it to the fonts on the Mac. After this we chose to animate the boy by having the image move in from the left off-screen, and at the same time fade in the background. To make the background more 3D we added a smoke particle emitter that gave the image some depth. We also chose to animate the logo and chose a text animation called static to give us the edgy feel we wanted. A very tricky part was animating the shadow. We knew we wanted to make the shadow shoot itself in some way, but didn't know how to. After discussing with our teacher, we tried adding in a mask over the head of the shadow, animating when the mask came in, and then on top of this we added an ink splash film that we turned red, to represent the blood. Finally we added in another of Motion's ready made films in the style of a larger inksplash that acted as transition at the end. To give the logo even more impact, we added sound effects using Soundtrack Pro, blending a cocking of a gun with a gun shot, and then following this up with a police siren, as if they were chasing the culprit. Finally we added our signature image of the CCTV camera in the bottom corner to continue with our sense of brand identity.
