critique - Logo design: is this too simple or boring?

I'm currently designing a logo for a film production company, but I am struggling a bit and would be grateful some feedback. This is my progress so far:

I've received some feedback from people on instagram and most seemed to have positive responses but some mentioned the general lack of colour and one said that it is more a badge rather than a logo and is "trying to be an illustration but it is not".

I'm also not sure if what I have done is too safe/obvious and whether I should perhaps come up with something more abstract? Or if it is too simplistic, but then I'm not entirely sure if that's necessarily a bad thing!

One idea which was raised was to go with something completely different and use an icon of a hatchet - as Baltag means hatchet apparently, but I feel that is beyong my logo design abilities.

The company is called 'Victoria Baltag Production', and in terms of design I haven't really been given anything else to go with aside from the name, and that it should convey that it is for a production company.

Answer

• I recently made a comment on another design, but that also applies in this case: avoid designing from our remote memory, on the contrary, take as a starting point a real reference and elaborate the abstraction. Especially when we are not very good at drawing. Is the logo a pictogram of the profile of a film camera?

• You are using a Gestalt Law: Figure-Ground. But then you self-sabotage the effect of your design by adding a parallel shadow! It's a nonsense.

Figure-ground perception refers to the tendency of the visual system to simplify a scene into the main object that we are looking at (the figure) and everything else that forms the background (or ground). The concept of figure-ground perception is often illustrated with the classic "faces or vases" illusion, also known as the Rubin vase. Depending on whether you see the black or the white as the figure, you may see either two faces in profile (meaning you perceive the dark color as the figure) or a vase in the center (meaning you see the white color as the figure).

• How many size reductions the word "PRODUCTION" will support?

• There are two relatively unrelated typography families: an Egyptian with a humanist sans-serif. This means one with an equal stroke and hard rectangular serif with a sans-serif with modulating strokes. As a contrast it is valid, but perhaps it should be more accentuated to not be interpreted as a graphical mistake.



• Red arrows: three different stroke/serif unions, if the typography is like that, in a two oversize characters playing with figure/ground, brings more confusion than quality to the design.


• Orange arrows: two different stroke/serif unions


• Green arrows: three different gaps between shapes

• This is a simple logo with eight shapes, six of them with different shape typology, will be good to find a formal meeting point to relation them. Shapes 2, 3 and 6 are very confusing perceptively. In a reduction, shape 2 looks like a mistake.

• A positive perceptive point you should enhance: the conjunction between V and B gives a point of support in the V and directionality in the B, perfect to finish with the camera lens. Don't be shy showing it, at the original design the whole lens is nearly hidden or worse, together they are a formal wall that stops the dynamics of the logo.