AICE Media Studies: The Monkey: Making a Production Company

For our production company, we went through a lot of names. At first, we though about combining the initials of all parties involved, and came up with several combinations of C, E, and G. For us however, titles like "CGE Productions" and "C, G, and E" weren't clicking with us. We couldn't envision those names in our title sequence stacked up with our name. We knew we could do better.

We went to the internet to research the production studios of famous horror movies. We had to sift through a lot of the major studios (Universal, 20th Century Fox, etc.) to get to the smaller studios that specialized in the horror genre.

Ones that caught our eye right out of the gate were Twisted Pictures, Atomic Monster Productions, and Full Moon Productions. The names were a little over the top, but nonetheless reflected the types of movies we were about to watch. With this in mind, we settled with Hackhouse Productions. The name was inspired by Blumhouse Productions, the makers of some of our favorite horror movies, including Get Out and the 2018 sequel to the original Halloween. The "Blum" in Blumhouse was derived from creator Jason Blum's last name, so we decided to take the same route. We decided to use Ethan's last name "Hackshaw" and shorten it down to "Hack," partly because it was shorter and catchier, but also because "Hack" is commonly associated with violence, which would perfectly fit our horror aesthetic.

The next step was making our logo. We researched the fonts used in different 80's horror movies, and found that many were imperfect, hand drawn fonts in red. Speifically inspiring to us was the title card for An American Werewolf in London (1981). To accomplish the hand drawn effect, Ethan and I cutout letters from notebook paper and arranged them on our desk to our liking. We then took a picture of the arrangement and put it in Photoshop to edit the coloring and sizing of some of the letters, and added in a cartoon axe to reflect the "hack" motif. We also added grain to the logo to make it feel more dirty, much like the aesthetic of the movies we were inspired by.