The Guide #269: The ident epidemic, and the true cost of movie-making

In this week’s newsletter: The deluge of whizzy production logos shown before films is a necessary annoyance – but there’s no excuse for them looking so naff

The outstanding release at the cinemas this week is Fjord, Cristian Mungiu’s Palme d’Or winner about the travails of a conservative Romanian Christian family in a liberal Norwegian community. Starring Sebastian Stan and Renate Reinsve, it’s the sort of chewy, divisive drama that seems precision-tooled to stir spirited post-cinema debates. I’d heartily recommend seeing it, but with one small warning: you’ll to have to sit through a possibly unprecedented number of production logos and idents – those whizzy graphics advertising the help of a studio, film board, or mysterious financier – before the film finally starts.

You know the ones: a CGI leaf slowly floats towards the ground over gently plink-plonking piano, and a logo for Autumn Breeze Productions or something flashes across the screen. There are 15 of these logos or idents before Fjord: I know this because the person sat across the aisle from me started counting them out loud, with increasing incredulity, after they reached the seven or eight mark. It’s the most I’ve ever seen before a film, but it’s also not a complete outlier: most independent films seem to have half a dozen or more.

So, are these idents really getting more numerous – and if yes, why? To find out more, I spoke to Stephen Woolley, veteran producer, actor and film-maker. Woolley has been in the independent film trenches since the mid-1980s, producing many of the films of Neil Jordan, as well as the likes of Made in Dagenham, On Chesil Beach and Carol – so he is perfectly placed to explain this current ident onslaught.

It’s a development that Woolley argues isn’t completely new – he points out a Family Guy clip (pictured below) poking fun at overly involved idents back in 2011 – but he does recognise there are quite a lot of them at present. He puts it down to “the problem of making films in Europe at the moment … For indie films in particular, you’re looking at trying to raise money from loads and loads of different sources because [these films] aren’t, on face value, particularly commercial projects.”

The easiest way to bolster your coffers is through “soft money”, raised either through private finance or through initiatives from countries’ film boards, who provide tax breaks or direct funding for shooting in, or employing people from, the country in question.

“For the film-makers, it’s a way of adding another 100k or 200k into the pot so that they can make a film at a decent level,” says Woolley. “It’s the one thing that’s not going to cost you anything, especially if the funds are benign, i.e. they don’t dictate anything [artistically].” But what you do need to do is provide a credit at the start of the film, which is where those idents come in – the more sources of funding, the more idents you’ll need to squeeze in before the film starts.

Woolley himself tried to combat the ident epidemic head-on a while ago, when he released the Neil Jordan vampire movie Byzantium. “We had so many logos at the front for it, so I got all the people to agree to [us showing] a card with six animated logos on it,” he remembers. “I thought I’d start a revolution. I thought, oh my God, this is what people are going to do now. But actually, no, I don’t think anybody else did it after that.”

Beyond the sheer number of idents, there’s the problem of how aesthetically unpleasing many of them are. Perhaps sensibly for someone in the business of making films, Woolley doesn’t name and shame any current offenders. (I can be less discreet: my personal least fave is the horribly naff CGI ident for TSG Entertainment, which you see on a lot of big US releases.) Still, he did dislike the old Irish Film Board ident that was emblazoned on a lot of his films with Jordan (“You have all this talent in Ireland, and that’s the best you can do?”). It seems the board, now known as Screen Ireland, has since bucked up its ideas.

There are some, though, that are genuinely miniature works of art – Woolley points to the classy Film4 staircase ident, and the stark lo-fi logo for Killer Films, with its archery-target bunny rabbit.

The trouble is, of course, that with so many logos and idents, the impact of them starts to dull. And even in the case of major studio films, which only tend to have one ident on them, the branding isn’t what it once was: unlike in the days when studios had certain talent contracted to them, as well as a focus on certain genres (monster movies for Universal, musicals for MGM), today “you wouldn’t be able to tell, nor would I, the difference between a Warner Brothers film or a Universal film”, Woolley says. And so those idents (Warners’ famous shield, Universal’s spinning globe) don’t carry the weight they once did. Whether your film is an indie or studio effort, the value of that little animation (or animations) at the start of it has diminished.

Nevertheless, the incentive and prestige is still enough to have lots of production companies, film funds and the like vying for space at the start of a film.

For Woolley, as a producer, “the more logos, the more impressive the feat. Somebody somewhere did a bloody good job getting all those people together. You don’t know how much work went into making that movie; somebody probably mortgaged their house to get it made.”

So as annoying as it might be to watch that succession of idents and logos, all the spinning globes, falling leaves and whizzy CGI, they are ultimately a necessary inconvenience: without them you might not be seeing the film at all.