Company Idents on their own:
General
Idents alone have to be over with within 5 to 10 seconds, maximum 20 seconds otherwise they become drawn out and lose the attention of the audience. As an ident is essentially a miniature ad for the company. Advertisements on TV are usually between 30 - 40 seconds and they have to try and sell a product. Idents don't so there is no need for more than 10 seconds of exposure, 20 seconds at a max. They have to be very simple as the only thing they are showing is the company names and these names need to be highly recognisable and remembered.
Examples
For example, everyone knows the iconic 20th Century Fox ident, the Pixar ident and the THX ident. They are so well known that there have been memes created around them. (One example below). A reason for their recognition is because of the idents. Yes, a large part of their success is due to the amount of times these companies have been a part of big movies. However, if I told you to describe the Bad Robot (Co-production SW Force Awakens amongst many other) or Dimension Films would you be able to recap it completely? If all these company idents were made differently, with a way longer duration and a lot more complexity I highly doubt that they would be as recognisable at a seconds glance, as these idents.
Audio
Music and ambient sound also plays a big part in a movie ident. Would you be able to identify the ident for each of these companies; 20th Century Fox THX Universal, Pixar and Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer? The answer is most probably yes as they have again, very simple but highly recognisable music and or ambient sound playing. It is usually a certain sound (the lion in MGM and lamp in Pixar) , or a simple soundtrack which you could recognise in a heartbeat.
Meme about the THX music:
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Idents in a film opening:
Variants
In a film opening you will usually see about 2, 3 or 4 movie idents, they can either have their original audio or be an audio bridge into the movie. They can also either be their own complete standard one or have a slightly altered colour scheme or way of presenting themselves in a way which relates to the movie. For example in Friday 13th part II(Steve Miner)(1981) the idents all have a sharp red colour scheme and there is an audio bridge which continues into the main opening scene. This is seen below. These signifiers help anchor the horror genre due to the blood red and the sound of knives being sharpened during the sequence, where stars are flying in the Paramount Pictures ident.
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This also happens for the 20th Century Fox in The Simpsons Movie( David Silverman)(2007) where Ralph sings the music for the ident. This action alone has managed to anchor the unserious, comedy aspect of the movie as it is so unexpected and absurd.
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Generally
Apart from these quite common variants the idents are usually just slotted into the absolute beginning of the movie and come, one by one. There will be shown idents from both the production companies and distribution companies. For lower budget movies they will also sometimes include the financing companies. For example there is an ident for FILM4 in the movie Four Lions(Chris Morris)(2010). FILM4 being the financing company for this very low budget Warp movie.
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