SYFY was curious to see what their famous grellow logo would look like in the hands of passionate fan creators, so they turned to Tongal to launch a monthly series of SYFY Fan-Made Logo Projects asking creators from all visual backgrounds to submit pitches showing: 1.) their love of genre, and 2.) how they’d incorporate the SYFY logo into the last 3-seconds of their video in surprising and novel ways.
Naturally, the chance to create original 10-15 second broadcast spots based completely on one’s love of fantasy, horror, sci-fi, comic books and more (much more!) instantly piqued our community’s interest. Creators from all over pitched us their visual love letters to their favorite genres giving us the chance to greenlight over 40 videos – like the one by animator Desiree Lavoy, a nightmarish homage to the slasher genre, which ends on a blood-splattered SYFY logo.
Or Chris Reading’s DIY teleportation device gone awry:
Or how Pangur Animation played mad-scientist with SYFY's logo:
Watch all the videos from our 5 fan creator interviewees here!
These videos illustrate the ingenuity of fan-fueled creative. Given the number of videos greenlit, we thought it was time for us to round up a few SYFY Logo creators and ask them about how their love of genre has inspired their short, quirky videos. The following Q&A has been lightly edited for clarity:
Maddie: First thing's first: tell us a little about yourself, your creative background, and what initially drew you to the SYFY Fan-Made Logo Project?
Richard Mather: I started my professional career in Austin, Texas as an illustrator and poster artist. Then I got a job designing computer games. I drew the backgrounds, designed spaceships and 3D modeled monsters. I moved to New York City and switched to 2D animation. I worked for MTV and other production houses. I started my own home-based animation studio, Richard Mather Studio, over a decade ago. I have always been a SYFY fan and a big science fiction fan and I make a lot of short videos with futuristic or fantasy based themes so the SYFY Fan-Made Logo Project was well within my comfort zone. I pitched several ideas with David Kilgo and happily, we got three of them accepted!
Desiree Lavoy: I’ve been working as a video editor and motion graphics designer for the last 6 years and before that I spent a lot of time writing and performing sketch comedy. I was initially drawn to the SYFY Fan Made Logo Project because the theme was Halloween, which caught my attention because I love Halloween. I am also a fan of the SYFY network so it seemed like a really fun job to work on!
Chris Reading: I’m a writer and director based in London, working on all sorts of things from commercials to features. I have been an active member of the Tongal community for the past couple of years and when I saw the SYFY Fan-Made Logo Project pop up I thought it was a great little project, mainly because I’m a genre film obsessive. More recently, I won a Tongal pitch for the ALIEN 40th Anniversary project and was given the opportunity to make a short film for Twentieth Century Fox set in the ALIEN universe, which was a-maz-ing.
Henry Smith: I'm an illustrator and designer from Salt Lake City, Utah. I've always loved drawing cartoons and eventually grew up making my career in the arts. The SYFY Fan-Made Logo Project had so much appeal. I knew I would love working on it based on the nerdy genres I'd get to explore.
Pangur Animation: We’re an independent stop-motion studio located in Valencia, Spain. When we saw the SYFY Fan-Made Logo Project we immediately knew we had to pitch for the project and show something creepy and funny at the same time – something that we would enjoy making from the beginning to the end since we had complete creative freedom. Being fans of science fiction, fantasy and terror films, we just couldn’t pass on this opportunity; these genres have been historically tied to stop-motion, so this project was in part a way for us to pay homage the pioneers of stop-motion.
Maddie: With such a wide spectrum of genres (and subgenres) to choose from, what led you to make your particular choice and how did your love of your chosen genre inform your creative concept?
Richard: I picked movies and themes that I am very familiar with, movies and genres that I love and then excitedly researched the genre to focus my video.
Desiree: I chose the slasher genre because I’ve always found it to be the scariest and therefore the most fun genre to watch. A common theme in a lot of slasher movies is urban legends, so my concept was in the slasher genre with a nod to urban legends we hear about someone sitting comfortably in their home not knowing that an escaped killer is inside the home until it’s too late.
Chris: My particular love is science fiction and I think most of the ideas I pitched for SYFY were sci-fi. I had recently seen Jeff Goldblum's classic “The Fly” and thought of the idea of a teleporter and when it all goes wrong, which is a great setting for comedy. I knew I wanted an element of retro too, and a shoddy home-made 'weird science' look was funny in itself.
Henry: I really love the visuals of B Movie science fiction and horror movies. There is something so charming, yet clunky about that era, I wanted to make something that paid tribute to that.
Pangur: Since we are a small studio everyone can pitch ideas, which brings a great deal of diversity to our creative process and benefits the end product. While exploring which genres we could use in the video, Pablo suggested to do something based on mad scientist B Movies and we loved the idea. We’ve grown fearing and admiring these type of characters: geniuses that have lost their north and use their supernatural intelligence to create something amazingly creepy. The only difference is that in this case, the creature would be the protagonist, instead of the scientist. Alongside Ivan, our Set and Puppet supervisor, we decided on the final look, color key and materials. After that, Ana created a storyboard to plan the hand and creature movements, a crucial step in this kind of animation. One of the most important differences of stop motion with computer animation is that we need to plan everything in detail beforehand since wanting to change the animation afterward would mean to shoot everything again; though we admit the creature animation was a bit more improvised than usual. We wanted to experiment and enjoy the process, so we just let Ana get in the skin of a mad scientist and let her create those morphs and tentacles.
Ivan from Pangur Animation playing mad scientist
Maddie: What is it like to approach a project as both a fan and a creator? How does being a fan help drive the creative process? Were there any challenges along the way?
Richard: When you are a fan it does make it easier to release the amount of effort 2D animation requires but also being a fan can force your attention more critically at details of your piece so it’s kind of a double-edged sword. But I really enjoyed making all three videos and I learned more skills in the process! There were challenges. “SY-FLY” was originally a tele-pod scenario but SYFY had already accepted another tele-pod idea so we had to start almost from scratch, get an approved animatic, but the finished product was way cooler than we had imagined!
Desiree: As a fan working on this project, it gave me a chance to be part of the fun! I think from being a fan I also had ideas that were ready to go as soon as I saw the posting for the project because I’d been watching content from this genre for so long. The main challenge was to come up with a story that could be told in such a short time.
Chris: As a fan, approaching a project like this is a little daunting, as so many memorable movie moments come to mind. As creators, we all want to be original and this was particularly challenging because sci-fi ideas like tele-porters have been seen and parodied so many times. I worked with my writing collaborator, Martin, who also stars in the film, to come up with a funny angle. Another challenge was the budget. We wanted to accomplish a science fiction look and feel, and we didn’t have much money to work with. To construct the “trans-paw-ter" I had some components and materials lying around from a previous Tongal project. Another massive challenge was thinking up enough cat-based puns to sprinkle over the production emails with the wonderful Stephen and Chris at Tongal HQ. Some were quite high level and passed completely under their radar. A great accomplishment fur us I think.
Henry: Approaching a project as a fan and a creator was interesting. SYFY is such a badass brand, and that really made me want to step up my creative game! Being a fan has the unique advantage of not being aware of the "rules" of the brand. I think this allows me to pitch weird ideas like an alien throwing up the SYFY logo because I don't know any better! The biggest challenge was definitely telling a story with such little time.
Pangur: With all the research we had to do, looking for movies, comics and movie posters, approaching this project as a fan was a blast. Imagine the added benefit of also being creators, your imagination just goes wild thinking of all the things you can do, also you pay more attention to detail since you want to be as perfect and cool as the original media that inspired you. As far as challenges, working with plasticine is always a complicated matter since it forces you to model it frame by frame, making it a slow process to shoot. We also had some issues with the lamps we used to light the set since they heated the tray a lot and the plasticine melted in some parts.
Ana from Pangur Animation shaping the plasticine
Maddie: How did you incorporate the SYFY logo into your spot and did the logo itself influence your overall concept?
Richard: I had the logo drift out of the machine in one video and in another, it was reflected in the eye of an android. I used both the horizontal logo and the vertically stacked logo. It was nice to have both options.
Desiree: At the end of the animation, the logo appears as a blood splatter while the main character is being drilled in the head. Because the shape of the logo is such an unnatural pattern for a blood splatter I think it made the logo reveal into a fun punchline.
Chris: To prepare for this project we had to make a fluffy cat version of the SYFY logo, our main influence was my friend’s pet cat, Raven. She was going to star in the film so continuity would be important. Building the logo to match the cat’s markings was quite fun and I think we were reasonably successful. Another key challenge was making the Logo Cat's tail wag, which was achieved using low-tech methods. I won’t reveal our trade secrets here. (It was a string).
Henry: Well, (and I guess logo-reveal spoilers here) I had a space hero get his chest blown out from an alien ray gun. The logo has those big block letters. I thought they looked big enough to be a gruesome hole.
Pangur: We decided to use plasticine for the organic material so we could morph it easily and create wacky forms, this way we could begin with a blob and end with the SYFY logo we modeled. The logo influenced the colors we used since they had to compliment the grellow color from SYFY. Luckily, everything worked great with it.
Maddie: 10-15 seconds is, well, short. How did you manage to create a compelling atmosphere and draw the audience into your genre-saturated world in such a short period of time?
Richard: I work in that format a lot. I have made hundreds of bumpers. I cut my teeth at MTV making the bumpers in between the ads and the music videos, so it's a format I'm very comfortable with. I also am a big fan of SYFY station IDs. They have made some amazing ones over the years that were very inspiring to me.
Desiree: I think the style of animation I used helped to draw interest. I was inspired by Terry Gilliam and David Lynch in the look and feel of the video.
Chris: Writing for a 10-15 second run time limit is tricky. We found the key was slick, economical storytelling. When storyboarding and filming, we ensured the focus was on the plot points we needed to convey, there was no time for any extra ideas. Although, we did come up with a couple of improvements to the boards during the shoot.
Henry: I think relying on some vintage sci-fi tropes really helped tell a quick story. I tried to paint a familiar scene for the audience to onboard them quickly.
Pangur: Yes! 10-15 seconds is very short indeed! To create the atmosphere, we liked the idea of everything taking place in a basement, with dim light, medical and mechanical elements; on the other hand, we couldn’t visually saturate the spectator in such a short time and the SYFY logo had to be clear and big enough to occupy a large part of the frame. So, Pablo did his magic as an illuminator and created this magnificent operating room lighting, using small mirrors to emphasize certain areas and elements and bam: we were in the basement of a mad scientist! Audio was going to be essential in creating this atmosphere, basically, you can create a visual masterpiece, but if you fail in the sound department you ruin that experience. David, who worked on the editing, VFX and compositing, helped define the audio to make it as eerie as possible. He also animated and composited the electricity sparks and refined the look and camera movement to achieve that unsettling feeling we wanted to reflect in the video.
Maddie: How has loving genre influenced other stuff you've worked on?
Richard: I try to let science fiction, fantasy, and horror influence my work as much as possible from editing, framing to designing. There is no avoiding it.
Desiree: Genre has always given me a good starting place for a project. It helps to get ideas going and also it’s a good point of reference for any creative decisions down the line.
Chris: I love working in genre and I reckon science fiction is unique in that you can transplant any other genre onto it. When writing, I often find myself trying to incorporate a left field, strange sci-fi concept. There’s always an old Star Trek episode you can draw on for plot ideas! Now, I’m afraid sci-fi has slightly taken over my life. I’m currently working on a sci-fi comedy feature film I’ll be shooting later this year. We really enjoyed working with Tongal and SYFY on this unique movie genre themed project, and look forward to future collaborations… May the paws be with you.
Henry: Loving genre introduces unique colors and quirks that I might not normally see in more traditional media. Plus, it's fun to watch!
Pangur: Luckily, we’ve been honored to work on more SYFY videos where we could work in more genres we adore and it’s incredibly rewarding to have these opportunities to have fun working in what you love.
