By Greg Pak
In several of my shorts, important images and sounds jump off the screen the instant the film starts. Many, many times I’ve seen these first few seconds spoiled during screenings because of bad focus or slow sound adjustments by sleepy projectionists.
So now I always put five to ten seconds of logo at the very head of my films. This is what business school geeks call “basic branding,” and is nice for promotional reasons. But more importantly, it gives the projectionist a few seconds to correct the film’s focus before the film itself actually begins.
I suppose the next step would be to put a trill of music behind that logo so sound levels could be checked as well, but I haven’t yet put my composers to work on my personal theme song just yet.
Maybe next week…