The Unfortunately Necessary Sequel
THE CORPORATION examined an institution within society. THE NEW CORPORATION reveals a society now fully remade in the corporation’s image, tracking devastating consequences and also inspiring movements for change. The New Corporation reveals how the corporate takeover of society is being justified by the sly rebranding of corporations as socially conscious entities.
- from the film website
Here's the opening sequence:
Design Challenges
Like many other expository documentaries, this project’s design challenge was to show varied information consistently: headlines, graphs, infographics, lower thirds, chapter headings, and, in this case, a bespoke opening sequence as an overture for the film. The prequel had a strong and pretty cheeky identity; this film needed to evolve from there with gravitas, a sense of gritty reality, but not an excessively ominous look.
We went with an overall textural overlay using photography of concrete, applied liberally to chew up typography and blocks of colour. Palette is limited: greys, red, warm and cool tints for positive and negative content.Type is blocky, strong. Lower thirds have a gentle flourish with a repeating mnemonic of unfolding panels. Headlines are exaggeratedly large, to give the content an exclamatory, poster-like impact. Custom-built templates for entry and exit transitions ensure the headlines have variety, but feel of a piece with one another. Chapter headings for the earlier, more doom-filled material used darker greys and blues with vertical stripes from barcodes as a transitional device; this changed to brighter tones and vertical tree trunks in the more hopeful ending sequences. Touches like these go a long way to help a film feel cohesive, and to signal structural progression for the audience.
Additional Design
Both documentaries are based on writing by internationally renowned law scholar Joel Bakan. Designing the book cover was a fun side-project, and a nice way to connect the identity of the book and film. Noam Chomsky calls the New Corporation A very important book, an arresting study directed to a central issue of the times.
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