B’03Film production

Dream Story Productions

A film production company, where the mark spends its life as a title card — on screen, in the corner of a frame, and on the back of a crew shirt.

Client: Dream Story Productions
Sector: Film production
Departments: Branding, Graphic design
Delivered: Brand board, lockups, palette, type, watermark rule

The delivered brand board — lockups, watermark rule, palette and type specimen. Click to open it full size.

How it started

The line on the board is two words: “Bold story.” For a production company that is the right length — a title card has about a second to land, and a sentence will not survive it.

So the identity is a wordmark problem rather than a symbol problem, and the board treats it that way: horizontal, reversed and stacked lockups, so the same mark can sit along the bottom of a 16:9 frame, in a square avatar, or reversed over footage.

The piece that makes it usable is the clear-space rule. A production logo is forever being dropped onto someone else’s edit, and without a specified margin it ends up crowded against a caption. The board gives that margin as a unit, not as a suggestion.

What it had to do

A wordmark that works as a title card: horizontal, stacked and reversed lockups, a clear-space rule with a defined unit, a five-colour palette with its codes, and a type pairing that carries both a credit roll and a call sheet.

A horizontal lockup for the bottom of a 16:9 frame
A stacked lockup for square and vertical placements
A reversed lockup for sitting over footage
A clear-space rule expressed as a unit, so it survives other people's edits
A five-colour palette with codes for grade-safe use

The identity

Everything below is read off the board above: the two lockups, the five colours with their codes, and the type pairing.

PrimaryThe mark on Paper White

ReversedThe mark reversed on Ink Black

Ink Black#0B0B0C

Paper White#F7F5EF

Ember Red#E8432E

Cobalt Blue#1C4CC0

Slate Gray#8B8880

Archivo BlackDisplay

Bold story.

Carries the headline and the short lines that have to land first.

InterBody

Everything read at length: detail, captions and the small print.

Set for the unglamorous copy a brand writes every week.

The sketch sheet

Concept sheets drawn as art direction for this page — they show how the mark and its placements were worked out, and are not scans of the original client drawings.

Three lockups and a marginThe arrangements get worked out as blocks first — horizontal, stacked, compact — then the clear-space rectangle is drawn around each one and measured in a single repeating unit, which is the part that stops the mark being crowded later.Concept visual

On the job

Process visuals — art direction by Dalc, not photographs of client production. A production mark lives on set and on a wall, so we art-directed it being cut and being used — neither image is a photograph of this client's studio or crew.

Concept visual: hands weeding cut vinyl lettering from a sheet on a workbench with a craft knife — Cutting vinylConcept visual

Concept visual: a stack of freshly printed call sheets and a film slate on a production office desk — Call sheetsConcept visual

The identity in use

Mockups made by our own team to show the identity applied — these are images we produced, not photographs of installed signage or products.

Studio wallMockup

ClapperboardMockup

Crew hoodieMockup

Bold story.
Dream Story Productions’s own line, set in the type specimen on the brand board

In conclusion

Three lockups and a clear-space rule are an unglamorous deliverable, and they are exactly what a production company runs out of first — the moment a logo has to go on a poster, a lower third and a crew shirt in the same week.

With the palette codes on the board, the mark also stays the same red after a grade, which is the difference between a brand and something that drifts every project.

Lockups: 2 — primary and reversed
Palette: 5 colours, codes on the board
Type: Archivo Black + Inter
Watermark: Rule supplied, shown on a portrait
Mockups: 3 shown on this page
Departments involved: Branding, Graphic design
Concept visuals: 3, made by Dalc for this case study