production company name really matter?

[tom lombard]

For a variety of reasons, this seems like the point at which I need to formalize things a bit (business cards, record keeping, banking, insurance, etc) so I need a "business name". The name likely doesn't matter much doing indie shorts but the hope is always to grow both production-wise & budget-wise. Does the name actually make a lot of difference? Do key words like cinema or productions or film actually carry much weight? Is something easy to remember, fairly generic, and family friendly good enough? Should I angst on this or just come up with something, go with it, and save my energy for more important issues? Thanks, Tom

[Max Field]

Just make sure you do something that's easy to remember and doesn't lead to other entities in Google results.

[Justin Hayward]

I guess I wouldn't do anything that's particularly uncreative if you're in the business of being creative.

[Michael LaVoie]

If you see a movie on Netflix or in the theater that you like, and the overall vision fits with yours and the kind of content you want your company to produce, follow the trail of logos at the front of the film and check out the websites of the companies for examples that are "comparable" to what you want to do.

 

Depending on what you're doing, you may want to be unique and somewhat different. here's an example. http://www.likely-story.com/

 

If you look under the projects on that site, you've heard of a lot of those films but probably not the production company. This is because the parent production company doesn't usually do a lot of branding of it's own as it's mostly an HQ for all of the individual LLC's that form for each movie. Those get more effort.

 

On the other hand, there are some horror production companies that tend to stick to that genre and the branding of the company, name etc. usually fits that type of content. Most production companies operate in modest anonymity and you haven't heard of them necessarily. Here's one that took that approach literally...haha - http://www.anonymouscontent.com/

[David Mullen ASC]

Terry Gilliam used to call his production company "Poo-Poo Pictures" because he liked the idea of forcing executives in studio meetings to say things to each other like "did you get the contract from Poo-Poo yesterday?"