Logorama

Logorama is an unconventional short film created at French studio H5 that plays with one of the most prominent cultural phenomenons of the past century: the evolution of brands, marketing and the refining of the act of persuasion for commercial purposes.

The film presents a world populated by brands (their logos and mascots) and plays with their artificially-crafted meanings, turning them upside down or creating semantic or visual gags with them. While the film uses unusual characters, the authors chose to create an entertaining narrative that keeps the audience hooked, and have thus used codes from the action, crime and catastrophe genres.

Staged in an urban environment (Los Angeles), Logorama employs a stylized, geometrized CG aesthetic with non-realistic (“toon”) shading, which is commonly used in logos and helps identify them easily. The salient characteristic of the short is, of course, its use of iconography, and how the playful resignification and recontextualization of symbols continuously create situations of humor and surprise. The crime film-style dialogue and sounds add another layer to the staging salad, tweaking the perceived meaning of brands, logos, icons and mascots further.

Quoting director Ludovic Houplain: “We live with these symbols from childhood; it’s fun to twist their meaning and association and see how people react.”