Atlas Films · distributor ident · candidate set v6
All five share one spine — the b4-inset lockup, and a rule that enters at the frame edge and crosses the picture. Three then borrow a flourish from Cara's own reference set. This pass is governed by one rule: a single driver. Every moving quantity derives from the same progress value and reaches its final value on the same frame, which is checked, not asserted — 840 frames, eight tests each, all passing.
The line enters at the frame edge, crosses the picture, and carries the wordmark in behind its leading edge. Nothing else happens.
The control. No flourish at all — judge the other four against this one.
From her MONO_13. The line crosses the whole frame and settles first. Only then does the wordmark rise up beneath it.
Two clean beats instead of one. The most deliberate of the five, and the one that gives the wordmark the most room of its own.
Rebuilt from her A-MERIDIAN. Seven evenly spaced rules share one leading edge, so their right ends are flush on every frame, then fold to the centre in unison as the wordmark comes up on the same curve.
The previous version staggered each rule separately, so their ends terminated at different points every frame and it read as a mess. One shared front is the entire difference between a comb and a mess.
From her S-ECHO. Three evenly spaced copies trail the wordmark to the left and collapse into one, offsets and alphas on a single curve.
Both the spacing and the fade reach exactly zero at the resolve, so the hold is one clean mark with no residue behind it.
The wordmark is set wide and tightens to its true letterspacing as the line completes — both on the same curve, landing on the same frame. The S is anchored, so the lockup's right edge never moves.
Replaces the anamorphic squeeze, which ran three unsynchronised transforms at once and distorted the letterforms Cara drew. Tracking is a real typographic move and leaves every glyph untouched.
| Raster | 1920 x 1080 (review) | 3840 x 2160 for delivery — matches the master exactly |
|---|---|---|
| Frame rate | 23.976 fps | 24000/1001, the master's own rate. 168 frames = 7.007s |
| Duration | 7.007 s | Inside the 5–10s the distributor-card clause allows |
| Ground | true black, 0 | NOT Cara's #0A0A0A — see the note below |
| Audio | none | Silent by design — see the note on the splice |
| First / last frame | uniform black | Verified on all five. Butt-cuts at both ends |
No music, as asked. But at the splice the ident needs 7.007s of actual silence in the master's channel layout, not a missing audio stream — drop the stream and every subsequent sound cue slips forward by the length of the ident. Silence is a thing you author, not a thing you omit.
The 66 GB master is PQ / BT.2020 10-bit. Splicing an sRGB card into it without
conversion will make the bone read wrong. The delivery render converts to
smpte2084 / bt2020 with the bone mapped near
100 nits — not the 1000-nit mastering peak. A bone-white card at
peak in a dark cinema is painful to look at.
Whichever wins, it should reach the DCP house as its own asset to be built as reel 1 of the CPL — not burned into the feature's picture essence. Same result on screen, and it keeps the film untouched.
All ten of Cara's originals are 3840 × 3840, because the mark is drawn on a 1080 × 1080 canvas. Nothing was wrong with the craft — the frame is simply the wrong shape for a cinema screen. They also ran at 24.000 fps against a 23.976 master. v3 keeps her letterforms and her lockups and rebuilds the frame around them.
§9 of the draft agreement currently says the marker “is not embedded in any master” and leaves [before] bracketed. Cara wrote the correct language on 29 July; it never made it into the draft. That, plus a written OK from Sam on the logo card specifically, wants to be settled before the house is paid.
Her mark files use #0A0A0A, which is right for web and print: on a white page a dead black looks like a hole. A cinema is the opposite case. The auditorium is dark, and a full-frame #0A0A0A card reads as a lifted black — the screen sits there visibly glowing grey for seven seconds and then drops when the feature's true black arrives. The ident has to live in the same black as the film's leader, so these are built on 0. It is the one place the mark files were not followed, and it is deliberate. The clips above are true black; this page's background is her ink, so you can see the difference at the edge of each picture.
The previous Meridian ran every satellite rule on its own stagger, so on each frame their right ends terminated at seven different x positions. Frame by frame it read as a mistake rather than a design. Now one leading edge draws all seven, so the ends are flush on every frame, spacing is even, and they fold in unison on the same curve as the wordmark.
The previous Anamorph ran a wipe reveal, an opacity fade and a horizontal scale simultaneously, none locked to the others, so nothing landed together. It also distorted the letterforms Cara drew, which is a bad trade for a move. Replaced with letterspacing: the word is set wide and closes onto the anchored S on the same curve as the line. Every glyph is untouched.
A hold can be byte-perfect and the arrival still be ugly, if the last moving frame
is a long way from the settled one. The verifier now measures the step into the hold
against the typical step of the twelve frames before it. All five report
0.00 — every flourish arrives exactly on the frame it claims.
840 frames, eight checks each: frame count, uniform
black at both ends, byte-identical hold, clear right margin on every frame, settled
wordmark inside title safe, no single-frame outlier, no snap into the hold, and a fade
that never brightens. Earlier passes caught two defects this way that the eye missed
entirely — a full-frame one-code-value flicker through every fade, caused by
compositing an ink rectangle over an ink ground, and sub-ground pixels on the glyph
diagonals. Both are gone, and the ground is now true black rather than Cara's
#0A0A0A, which on a cinema screen reads as a lifted black.