Kaun (1999) - Reference

I feel like some of the shots while I was lighting it, I was subconsciously ripping the lighting and cinematography from this old Hindi movie - Kaun, directed by one of my favorite Indian directors - Ram Gopal Verma. The cold blue outsides seeping into the warm orange interiors, the cheesy acting and the surprise twist in the end of the movie are all common elements between our interstitials and this movie. I also feel the style of music and sound FX from this movie would suit very well for our piece.

Lighting Reference: King's Speech

This movie has overall very soft light, and soft shadows. The color correction is more natural and not overly saturated or warm. We can achieve such soft lights and shadows with paper lanterns.

Costume Inspiration

Web design inspiration

forefathersgroup.com Vintage meets modern design - classy, period savvy and fun.

aboard-entrepreneurship.com/ - another clean, elegant retro design.

Here's a post on Retro Style in Web Design.

Here's a guide to make retro web design, it's a bit trivialized but seems like a good place to start

Here's a collection of 1920s style fonts.

More lighting references

Mad Men has excellent lighting and layout. Notice the lighting template - soft and bright key, hard high-angle rim and very little fill. Even on moderately high-key environments they pull off to make the characters look mysterious by letting generous amounts of shadows creep on the side of the faces, all while maintaining good detail and definition in the shadow regions and the eyes.

Another important thing to consider is luminance. The interstitials will be surrounded by bright and saturated student animations, so we need to have high contrast and brightness in the interstitial videos. This will help the viewers eye gets a clean read of the set and characters within the limited amount of time available for establishing shots. Good examples of this are movie trailers, where the contrast is slightly bumped up to make them gel better with the brighter titles in between.