You can be sure that you’re on the path to creating an innovative idea when “What if…” isn’t simply treated as pie-in-the-sky thinking, but as a concrete starting point for the brief. It was the question posed by MPC’s Russell Appleford to Brett Foraker, creative director at 4creative, Channel 4’s in-house agency. “What if we were to take the old Lambie Nairn-designed ‘4’ to one of the new state-of-the-art post-production houses to reanimate it?” he asked. “What would they do with it?”

At the time, Bijou and Shake were the new animation software packages. When the team saw the possibilities the programs allowed, they immediately recognized the potential to create an ident package that literally no one had seen before. The ultimate goal of the rebrand was to create a bold visual statement based on Channel 4’s values of creativity and innovation: the network was the first broadcaster to use computer graphics in its on-air branding in 1982, after all. Foraker and the team at 4creative, in collaboration with MPC, Rudd Studio, Pete & Tom, Envy and Fontsmith, took Nairn’s original ‘4’ logo design from 1982 and using the software, separated the logo’s nine stenciled pieces and placed them within the context of various environments.

In “Dubai”, for example, the camera pans across a skyline of buildings, with elements from each building representing a piece from the stenciled logo. As the camera reaches a certain point, the ‘4’ logo is constructed from those elements for a mere 1/25th of a second before the camera moves on and the image disperses.

“[It was challenging] convincing the powers that be that the logo should only resolve for one frame,” says Foraker. “It was actually quite a conceptual leap. In traditional branding exercises this would be considered heretical but we were convinced we could make this one of the proprietary attributes of the channel.” The idents would go on to win a D&AD Black Pencil and launch Foraker’s directing career; he was signed to RSA Films on the strength of them. Q

www.4creative.co.uk