Open Door Studio
Horror Film Festival

Open Door Studio is a film production company expanding into Vancouver with a three-weekend film festival — Comedy in Kelowna, Indie and Horror in Vancouver. I was selected as part of the festival design team for the Horror leg at the Hollywood Theatre.

Two deliverables: an animated studio intro (the branded sequence that plays before a movie in the theatre), and a 27"x60" large-format poster for the Horror Film Festival. Both needed to follow the horror theme while incorporating "Open Door Studio" branding.

I started by researching real studio intros — Paramount, Universal, Lionsgate — studying how they use camera movement, lighting, and sound design to build atmosphere. From there I moved into typography exploration in Illustrator, testing different typefaces before landing on Aviano Future with the "OO" in DOOR replaced by actual door shapes — a visual pun that ties the brand name to the concept.

The intro environment is a hallway built from a grunge wall texture, tiled and arranged in 3D space to create a tunnel effect. At the end of the hallway sits an AI-generated glass door (created with Gemini). The camera travels through this hallway toward the logo reveal. A ghostly figure — generated using Adobe Firefly Video — was composited into the sequence for the horror element.

The After Effects project uses the Cinema 4D renderer for true 3D camera movement. The wall panels are tiled using Motion Tile and arranged as 3D layers. Fractal noise generates the smoke effects. Multiple compositions — Wall, Smoke, Movement to Logo, Logo, and Logo with Girl — are layered in the main comp with precise timing to build the reveal.

The poster started with element creation in Illustrator — building the film strip border with sprocket holes from scratch. I then moved into Adobe Express to test layout compositions and spatial arrangements before committing to the final build in Photoshop.