MPC London has produced two campaigns for Channel 4 in the UK –the first 9 spots, the second with 7 — which have won numerous awards in the industry. They are simply some of the most engaging and brilliant station identifications in recent years. We spoke with Russell Appleford of MPC about how they were made.
The series of indents has won:
– The D&AD Gold Award for the Most Outstanding Achievement Television & Cinema Brand Identity
– Two Creative Circle Golds – Best On-Air Branding and Best VFX
– Tow Promax Golds for Best VFX (Tokyo) and Best On Air idents
Brett Foraker, Creative Director of Channel 4, and Russell Appleford, Designer and MPC CG Supervisor collaborated to direct and design the second series ‘ Atlas Project’ idents for the re-branding of Channel 4 London. In each spot, the Channel 4 ident aligns or effortlessly comes together as the viewer moved in and out of alignment with the spots environment. They are beautiful, creative and represent near perfect 3D tracking combined with natural 3D and great compositing.
The campaign started at the beginning of 2006 and there have now been two sets of spots produced. In each set of idents the iconic Channel 4 logo has been broken down into its original 9 blocks and reforms visually by natural alignment as the viewer moves through the environment. For the second series, the series of logos is made up from amongst other things, storage containers, tokyo street signs and a music festival stage.
The first set of idents showed the Channel 4 logo broken down into its 9 blocks subtly disguised as elements found in each environment shown. While the blocks are static in each of their surroundings, our first person perspective camera moves through the sequence to reveal the Channel 4 logo at the midpoint. The 12 different locations include a privet hedges gliding through a bowling green, hay bales stacked on a stubbled field, looming pylons trailing from a nuclear power station, road work signs on the motor-way and neon hoardings for an American diner.ÂÂ
Appleford and his team created wire frame models of each of the elements making up the 4’s characters in Maya. The blocks were then rendered and the relevant textures were applied to ensure they appear to be part of the environment they are seen in. These animated elements were subsequently tracked into backgrounds using boujou.  MPC’s team of Inferno artists worked on the various spots over a period of 6 months. Lead operator, Mark Stannard painstakingly matched the 3D animated elements to the live action background plates. Once the rigged ‘4’s’ were sitting correctly in the shots, lighting and textures had to be corrected so they were perfectly integrated throughout
We spoke to Russell Appleford, on the project.
fxg: What programs do you use for tracking?
Appleford: Boujou Bullet was used for feature tracking and boujou_3 was used for solving.
fxg: Do you do lens correction? If so, is the image composited undistorted and then re distorted later once composited?
Appleford: I only used lens correction on the Tokyo ident as it used such a wide angle lens. My initial solve generated a scene where the floor plane on an otherwise flat street was curved downwards which made it impossible to place objects in the scene -As an object moved in and out of the shot it would appear to have moved when it was out of the camera’s eye. By adding lens correction to the back plate the next solve Boujou produced was near perfect, a little more tweaking and the move was perfect. Although this did solve the problem, it did mean that I had to then render my render passes (60 passes of 1000 frames at HD) at a higher resolution to accommodate for the fact that the back plate had been effectively stretched out and upscaled by Boujou.
fxg: Did you do anything to aid the tracking on set?
Appleford: I always make sure that non trackable items in the shots (i.e. moving people, cars, objects blowing in the wind etc) do not cover a too high percentage of the frame. If there is a nodal pan in a shot I always ask the DOP to keep moving his feet as this subtle amount of translation will add a small amount of parallax which will aid in getting a more accurate track.
fxg: For the 3D inserted into the shots — what techniques did you use?
Appleford: All the idents use multi-pass rendering, usually consisting of at least colour, ambient-occlusion, shadows, reflections and various masks to aid in grading etc. Also each of the nine blocks that make up the c4 logo are each rendered individually which does increase the complexity on the outset but this is a trade off for the massive gain in control that this enables in the comp.
fxg: How closely were the pieces ‘designed’ before you go on set. How much of the Asian street was real and how much was art department or studio?
Appleford: I don’t design any of the blocks before I get on location. I always have a rough idea of what I’m going to create but until I arrive and get a feel for the environment I never know for sure. I always take hundreds of reference photos during shoot set-up time which are invaluable when I get back to MPC and start designing my objects. So far every ident has had all of its blocks rendered in 3D with the exception of “Trafalgar” where the close-ups’ with Pigeons on the blocks were done in a studio and “Lazy Bloke” which had the fore ground blocks built by art department, running along the floor on tracks.
fxg: Did you find there was any key point to selling the spots? Pace or timing – look or visual cues?
Appleford: The main point of the idents was to make each shot look as though it has been “found” by the viewer. We always try to make the shots as least contrived as possible, we try and shoot everyday views but with a hopefully hidden underlying layer quality in the cinematography of the shots. Timing of the “hit point” (when the logo forms for a single frame) is usually done in a way so that something happens in the plate that temporarily distracts you -whether it is a tumble weed, a bridge, a container being hoisted by a crane. These additions to the shot deliberately detract from the hit point to make it feel more “found”.
Talking about the production, Russell added “It was great to work on such a high profile and extensive project, especially when the experience is enhanced by attention to detail remaining the main impetus of everyone involved.