Company Wide Shut created the logo and main titles for the forthcoming CBS comedy, Living Biblically.
The story of a man who decides to live in strict accordance with the Bible, the title's creative direction drew from the leather grain and gold embossing of the book's typical cover.
In addition to the main titles, Company Wide Shut created the production company card for Pat Walsh's Enrico Pallazzo.
The series premieres February 26, 2018.
Company Wide Shut lent its design skills to the main titles of Norman Lear's new show for Netflix, One Day at a Time. The uptempo main title sequence - animated to the beat of Gloria Estefan's version of the original theme song - had to cover a lot of ground in its fifty seconds.
Set in Los Angeles, the sitcom focuses on a multi-generational Cuban-american family living under one roof. That Cuban-american heritage became the foundation of the title sequence, weaving familial and political histories (matriarch Rita Moreno's character having fled Castro's Cuba as a child during the Operation Pedro Pan campaign of the early 1960's).
The Echo Park neighborhood and Cuban-american culture were other key ingredients, as was an emphasis on Justina Machado's single mom character being both a nurse and a veteran.
With Producer Rhys Ernst, Company Wide Shut designed the opening titles for Jill Soloway's landmark series, Transparent.
The project was not a first collaboration with Soloway, having designed the opening titles for her feature film, Afternoon Delight, and her short film, Una Hora Por Favora - both Sundance Film Festival favorites.
Company Wide Shut has continued to adapt the titles and end credits since its first season to the present.
Deadpool comic fans are well acquainted with its hero’s irreverent sense of humor and chimichanga obsession. The menu creative for the film adaptation's home entertainment release leverages these key attributes into its design concept.
The menus (for DVD, Blu-ray and UHD) begin with a quick-cut sequence of extreme close-ups in Deadpool’s dingy apartment kitchen: a chimichanga is unwrapped, plopped on a plate and placed in a dirty microwave. The unsanitary microwave interior becomes the unlikely setting for this blockbuster’s menus, the radiated chimichanga rotating hypnotically in the foreground. Through the oven’s glass door, Deadpool and his roommate Blind Al are seen in the background, doing extremely mundane activities.
The experience remains thoroughly anti-heroic for the first thirty seconds, then transitions to a more traditional action-oriented montage set to a pulsing DMX single (the chimichanga menu not seen again until the next disc insertion).
A special 4k video shoot featuring half-a-dozen unique setups was done in-house for the menu's intro and microwave POV sequences.
The last entry into the Planet of the Apes’ Caesar story arc was at its core a classically structured war movie. In order to forefront the elements of human / ape conflict that had been building in the series, Company Wide Shut conceived of and shot a stark intro sequence for 20th Century Fox’s home entertainment release on UHD/Blu-ray/DVD/iTunes.
The menus begin on a white field - a nod to the snowy environs in this final chapter - and are immediately punctuated by bursts of red. Silhouettes of the Andy Serkis character are revealed in this brief sequence, timed to the beats in Michael Giacchino’s score.
Company Wide Shut has created a range of animated logo IDs for various production companies. Time-based logo development presents creative challenges and opportunities - making the most within a typically 2-second window.
Production companies or IDs shown include: Enrico Palazzo (Living Biblically), Topple (Transparent), 72 productions (Afternoon Delight, Inequality for All), Automat Pictures and a title card for a 2011 Emmy Awards broadcast sketch.
Director James Mangold’s take on Hugh Jackman’s final bow as Wolverine drew inspiration from the comic series Old Man Logan. Logan similarly tackled a late-in-life adventure for the titular character, but trimmed some of the comic’s sci-fi excesses to focus on its central characters, wrapped in a grounded classic western.
This gritty, minimalist approach was the guide for Company Wide Shut’s menu creative on Fox’s home entertainment release. An identical monochromatic version was tailored for the film’s Logan Noir black and white release.
Company Wide Shut designed the UHD/Blu-ray/DVD/iTunes menus for Noah Hawley’s Fx show, Legion. The first season of the show established its unique visual style and ungrounded protagonist, and the motion graphics montage for this release echoed the same playfulness and instability.
Company Wide Shut developed the logo and motion graphics for Funny or Die’s short video, Church & State.
Directed by Jill Soloway and starring Jane Lynch as Church and Jordan Peele as State, the tension between the two characters was presented as a 1970s era television variety show.
Company Wide Shut designed and produced this interactive feature for the critically acclaimed FX series, American Crime Story: The People v. O.J. Simpson.
The timeline - designed for the Blu-ray release - was intended to enhance the series’ adaptation of events by allowing the viewer to delve deeper into the real-world courtroom drama.
Clips of the show accompany fifty-plus factual events that gripped the nation over twenty years ago.
The Blu-ray menus for Lost in Space: The Complete Adventures were designed to reflect the varying personalities of each season: from the earnest family-in-space adventure of Season 1, to the Technicolor alien-of-the-week campiness of Season 2, to the reinvented spirit of exploration of Season 3. Above all, the series presented indelible characters set against fantastical alien surroundings, and the menus showcase those attributes. The release spanned 83 remastered episodes over 18 discs.
Company Wide Shut's primary contribution to this photo-sharing app by Disney Interactive was defining the rich media presentation of users' snapshots and stories.
The app was able to leverage the Walt Disney Company's wide range of intellectual property into personal - and sharable - mementos, for busy parents and their extended family and friends.
The video on this page was an internal-facing sizzle reel for the Walt Disney Company, highlighting the synergistic benefits of the Story app to its various Disney divisions.
The latter portion of the video serves as an overview of available Story themes.
Themes, in order of appearance:
Frozen
ESPN SportsCenter
Disney Parks (Disneyland)
Pixar’s Toy Story
ABC Family (25 Days of Christmas)
Winnie the Pooh
Paris Mickey
Non-IP holiday theme (Season’s Greetings)
The Little Mermaid
Holiday theme (Winter Wonderland)
Mickey Skiing
Pixar’s Cars
This interactive feature was created for 20th Century Fox Home Entertainment for their Blu-ray release. The interactive Cosmic Calendar visually conveyed the entire span of creation - from the Big Bang to the present day - as a 12-month calendar.
Following an introduction by Executive Producer Ann Druyan, one could navigate the at-a-glance calendar, view clips from the series and access other information related to the creation of our galaxy and the universe beyond.
The project was awarded a CLIO Entertainment Award in 2014.
This short film by writer/director Jill Soloway, starring Michaela Watkins and Wilmer Valderrama premiered at Sundance in 2011.
Company Wide Shut designed the film's titles, one sheet and promotional CD packaging.
After years of working with New Line Cinema and director Peter Jackson on the home entertainment releases of the epic J.R.R. Tolkien theatrical adaptations, Company Wide Shut was hired to design the end title sequence for the third film in the Lord of the Rings trilogy.
Working alongside Alan Lee - the Academy Award-winning concept designer of the films - we developed techniques for highlighting Lee's sublime cast portraits as well as providing a visual 'return journey' from Mordor.
The 11-minute sequence - set to an Annie Lennox composition - spanned 37 individually credited names and 57 end crawl layouts.
Company Wide Shut designed the titles for Jill Soloway’s feature film debut, Afternoon Delight.
The sequence was intended to give the audience a glimpse of the ennui of its protagonist Rachel (Kathryn Hahn). In the opening titles Rachel literally relinquishes control - exiting the driver’s seat of her car while moving through an LA car wash, choosing instead to briefly occupy various passenger seats within her cavernous family van. Her actions within the vehicle are a micro scale enactment of the larger scale searching she embarks upon later in the film.
The text initially appears on screen in sync with Rachel's numbed playing with the dashboard's phone interface, then acts as a counterpoint to Rachel's migration within the vehicle.
At its Park City debut, Soloway won the Sundance dramatic director award for the feature.
Company Wide Shut designed and animated the motion menus for 20th Century Fox's home entertainment release of the Cameron Crowe film, We Bought a Zoo.
The fanciful motion sequence featured illustrated depictions of the zoo's inhabitants, appearing in an animated carousel set to music by Sigur Rós' Jonsi.
Company Wide Shut designed and produced the interactive features and DVD and Blu-ray menus for the Comedy Central movies and Fox's final four seasons of Futurama.
In addition to the animations, each release required multiple original illustrations, extending the futuristic world of the fan-adored Matt Groening show.
The story of a growing friendship between awkward high school senior Greg and his gravely ill classmate Rachel required a tone that was neither overly sentimental nor melodramatic. The creative solution focused on the protagonist’s filmmaking ambitions, who - along with his friend Earl - made dozens of short, creatively effervescent parodies of great works of international cinema. Company Wide Shut worked with director Alfonso Gomez-Rejon’s illustrator and vignette-creator for the film - Nathan Marsh - for original vignettes for the Blu-ray, DVD + iTunes menus.
Six original vignettes were made for the disc, recreating key environments seen in the film as illustrated, paper cut-out constructions. The watercolor dioramas were then puppeted before a continuously panning camera, with strips of colored paper added in post-production to seam the vignettes into a singular, two minute experience.
