Planning and Research: History of Logos - Martin

 In the early days of Hollywood, production logos and brands were simple and very much like their print counterparts, usually appearing on title cards and opening credits. The Paramount Pictures mountain hails from this era, and originally featured no special effects. As the studios grew, more effort was put into their identities and motion and sound began to be used. MGM and Universal were the first studios to take advantage of the new medium's possibilities, MGM first using Leo Lion in 1924 and Universal debuting their globe around the same time.

Paramount Pictures Logo

20th Century pictures introduced their futuristic 'tower' logo which had moving searchlights; it was carried over when they merged with Fox film Corporation and became 20th Century Fox. Columbia's first version of the torch lady used a sparkler to represent her torch, and Universal's globes could rotate. The advent of Television in the 1950s also opened the door to cel animation in production logos. Most studios had used cels for their animation department's logos for some time by this point, but the demand for animation on TV, both as programming and for advertising, made more effects available for less money. By 1976, all of the major studios except universal had switched their logos for smaller concerns.

Columbia Pictures Logo

With the 1980s came a return to the older style of logos. Warner Bros, one of the first studios to switch to a cel-animated abstract logo,  brought back their WB shield logo as a matte painting in 1984. TV logos began switching from cels and 2D computer graphics to 3D computer graphics around the same time, and by the end of the decade, the quality of 3D animation had improved to the point that cinema quality was possible. Paramount had introduced a digital-looking logo in late 1986, but only the foreground animation in their logo was computerised (the mountain backdrop is a model). Universal's 1990 logo, introduced for its 75th anniversary, was pre-visualized with CG, but the actual logo was created using motion-control models. Throughout the 1990s, fully computer-generated logos increased in frequency. By 2007, almost all production logos have become produced (or edited) on computers, and have reached a level of sophistication equivalent to that of the best special effects.