Branding: Production Company and Logo

 Branding- Creating My Production Company:

Branding is "the promotion of a particular product or company by means of advertising and distinctive design". In short, branding is creating an identity for your company, or brand. It is creating a distinctive design that is associated with your production company and product. For that, first of all, I have to create a production company, and then a logo. It might be a good idea to then create social media accounts such as Instagram for the production company and to record all the work and progress. 

Production Company Name:

The first step I have to take is coming up with a name for my production company. 

Production company names can be of two kinds:

- NAME + "FILMS" OR "STUDIOS" ETC.

        -Universal Pictures

        -20th Century Studios    

        -DreamWorks Pictures

        -New Line Cinema

- ORIGINAL NAME ONLY:

        -MGM

        -Miramax

        -Lucasfilm

        -Lionsgate

Usually, animated film companies tend to use the ending "pictures" more than other ones, because it is associated with more mainstream and PG films. To help me decide, I looked at the production companies for some of my favourite romance films:

• About Time- Universal Pictures
• He's Just Not That Into You- New Line Cinema, Warner Brothers
• My Best Friend's Wedding- TriStar Pictures
• The Notebook- New Line Cinema
• Safe Haven- Relativity Media
• La La Land- Summit Entertainment 
• The Holiday- Columbia Pictures, Universal Pictures, Relativity Media
• Notting Hill- Working Title Films, Caravan Pictures

Final Decision:

After a lot of thinking, I have come up with four different production company names:

    -AURA productions 

    -Imaginary Studios

    -Holographic Productions

    -Holographic Studios

After consulting with friends and family I chose "Holographic Studios", because it has an original touch that I could play with very well when making the logo, and it is related to film. However, after checking to see if there was any company with that name already, I realised that the oldest gallery of holography in the world has this name. Therefore, I decided to change the name to "Holographic Pictures". This change happened after I designed my final logo, so I changed the final design only.

Production Company Logo:

I did not really know what I wanted the logo to be like, so I just used logo creator apps, put the name of the company and looked at some ideas, such as these:

The concept of "holographic" made me think of having many colours, as a sort of rainbow effect, which is why I tried to include a colourful design in the logo, to match the concept. I was quite convinced with the third option, and I tried to do a version with the black background to see how it looked, so I tried a couple more designs. I have to say that because the apps I used were not free, and you had to create an account in order to use the logo, I had to find ways to screenshot the images and get rid of the background by playing with the brightness and contrast of the image. For the black background, this was trickier, as I had a screenshot of the go on a white background, but in the end, I managed to do it and ended up with these:

I was almost set on one of the two designs on the black background, but I still had one logo creator app to try, and I also wanted a design that had a more "holographic feel to it". The last app (https://studio.tailorbrands.com/brands/free) helped me create some logos that I was really happy with, such as these:

However, the rainbow-like feature from the other designs, which I really liked, was not included in these new logos. The third icon with the holographic person really embodied the name "Holographic Studios", so I thought of trying to do some sort of rainbow version of this icon. For this, I screenshotted the icon in different colours and cropped the images so that they built up a rainbow-shaped figure. I also found a cool font for the name, and ended up with this:

This is the first draft of the logo I actually ended up designing and choosing. I rather liked the idea of having a logo with a back background, so I tried to blend the image with the black background which created a layered effect due to the different layers of screenshots to create the rainbow effect. Also, I added a "reflection" feature to the name, and this was the result:

I was almost set on the last logo when I discovered an app to remove the background from an image, and this way I came across my final logo:

It is quite simple and clear, it has the rainbow effect, as well as the holographic concept, and a slick, black background. I also made a version of this logo with a white background and a less formal way which I could use on specific occasions, or not at all:

Next Steps:

Next, I will create both an Instagram account and a YouTube channel for my production company, and I am also considering remodelling my blog to make the theme match that of the production company logo.