Digital Cinema Content Format Information

Introduction

This wiki page aims to inform you of how to produce slides for the LCD screen and pre-show slideshows, including functional organisation, best practices, and design requirements. Please note that since the Marketing Team is a very new committee, and some aspects of its organisation are still being decided upon, the information in here will be subject to change. You will be informed of any changes via the mailing list and meetings. If you have any questions, please contact the Marketing Officer.

Please read this page carefully, as we cannot use any slides which do not adhere to these guidelines.

Organisation

Please aim to make your slide at least two full weeks before the film being advertised is shown. This leaves a week for changes to be made in response to feedback, and then the slide can be put in the slideshow a week before the showing.

Before you start work on a slide, please check the mailing list to ensure that no-one else has already made a slide, or started work on a slide, for that film.

One slide is needed for every film, so if a film is coming up which no-one has yet claimed for slide-making, it will be allocated to whoever on the team has least recently helped out. First-drafts of slides should be sent to the mailing list for the rest of the team to give constructive feedback on. Once this feedback has been acted upon, the finish slide should be emailed to the Marketing Officer for inclusion in the slideshows.

Please bear in mind that we work to a professional standard at WSC – if you would like a personal training session on how to produce the best quality slides, this can be arranged with the Marketing Officer.

For every slide you finish, you will be rewarded with one free film credit. This will be assigned to your University ID card so you can use it at one of our showings. If you complete five slides in one term, you will be given Crew status for the whole of the rest of the term, which allows you and a guest to get into all the films for free!

Slide Basics

Slides are static (i.e. non-animated) images, which must be exactly 1920 pixels wide and 1080 pixels tall. You should save your final slide image as a .png file, or a high-quality .jpeg, but make sure to keeps the editable source of your file (i.e. the PowerPoint or Photoshop [etc.] file you used to make the slide), so that changes can easily be made.

You should not place any text or logos within 50 pixels (approximately) of the edge of the slide. This is partly because the edges can get cut off by the cinema projector, and also because the cinema projector can cause images to be slightly blurry towards the edges. Background images should go all the way to the edges, though.

Every slide must contain at least the following:

-The title of the film, preferably the official logo used on posters, etc. The Publicity Team keeps a variety of film logos in their archives, though often these are in black and white rather than the original colouring, and so are not suitable. Make sure to remove backgrounds from logo text using whatever image editing tools you are comfortable with. For most films, it is fairly easy to find high-quality logos using Google Images.

-The day and time(s) of the film showing(s). An exact date or week is not required but you can include this if you want to fill more space. It would be great if you could style your font to look similar to the font/style used in the movie’s title, or if you could otherwise theme the font according to the genre of the film.

-Warwick Student Cinema logo. This is available in white or black by default and is included in your starter pack. Feel free to modify the colouring and styling to suit the film if you want, but please do not modify the shape or design of it. The size of the logo should be 266x295 pixels (width x height) if space allows, so that it is consistent across most of the slides, though you can shrink it if you’re having trouble fitting everything in.

-Sponsor Logo (currently KPMG). This comes in white and blue variations. White should be used in most situations, but if the background is particularly bright then the blue variation can be used instead. You should not modify the colours of this logo or any aspect of its design. Again this is a standard size, 263x102. This should only be shrunk as a last resort. Wherever possible you should try to include text saying “Sponsored by” immediately above the logo. The font “Century Gothic” is normally used for this, though again you may use an alternative if you think it would suit the style of the film better. This font is included in your pack, but is included by default with most Windows versions.

-Relevant promotional logos. WSC runs numerous promotions such as “Free films for members”, “Oscar Tuesdays”, “Midnight Screenings”, etc. If the film is a part of one or more of these promotions, you must include the appropriate logos – all included in your pack.

-Some imagery related to the film. Normally this will be in the form of a high-quality, high-resolution still from the film which fills the entire background of the slide, but feel free to be creative. Again, Google Images makes it really easy to find high-quality pictures.

No logos or text should ever overlap!

Other things you may optionally want to consider including are:

-The names of any well-known actors or directors in film

-A brief description of the film, in the case of obscure, less-well-known films. Slides will only be shown for 15 seconds at a time so this should not be more than approximately 20 words.

-Any awards the film has won

-Anything else at all that you think the audience should know!

If you are uncertain on any of these points, please don’t hesitate to ask the Marketing Officer. The Marketing Officer will also happily arrange training sessions on request if you would like to be personally shown how to make good slides.

Handy Tips

-You should never stretch or scale an image up from its original size, as it will become pixellated and reduce the quality of your slide. You can set Google Images to search only for images larger than 2MP, and these should be sufficiently large for full-background images.

-Any text which is smaller than font size 12 will be difficult to read.

-Adding a drop-shadow effect to logos and text can help them to stand out better against busy backgrounds.

If you require any of the resources mentioned in this page (e.g. starter pack, logos) please do not hesitate to contact the Marketing Officer at marketingofficer@filmsoc.warwick.ac.uk.

Thank you for your help!