How Channel 4’s New Identity Reflects Modern Britain

Seventeen independent creatives, artists and filmmakers came together last month to create the emotionally colourful tapestry of 25 looping scenes depicting  life in modern Britain for Channel 4’s bold brand transformation. 

Drawing on the concept of the ‘4’ as a traveller through the truths of the nation, the brand’s in-house creative agency 4creative interpreted five themes - identity, the land, system, release and love. Those themes are explored as the viewers dive through the changing idents inside the number four, indulging in live-action, animation and full CG scenes that represent chaos held together by one system - all while listening to the poignant spoken word written and performed by John Joseph Holt. 

This was a project long in the making. Lynsey Atkin, executive creative director at 4creative reveals that there had been talk of a rebrand ever since she joined the in-house team four years ago, but it became a priority for the broadcaster in 2021. While the ‘blocks’ anti-branding that had been in use since 2015 were ‘brilliant for its time’, she reflects that in a transformed media landscape of global streamers, it became important to once again hero Channel 4 and make it recognisable for the people it represents. “So, after two years of work, the Channel now looks totally different - a whole new on screen presentation, a new brand colour, new social layouts, a newly created graphic language and a whole set of recognisable but flexible movement principles.” After all this, the idents became the last, epic piece of the puzzle - “The crown jewel of our rebrand,” says Lynsey.

As Lynsey herself admits, a Channel 4 rebrand is a big deal - not just for the broadcaster, but for the hundreds of thousands of people who watch it every day. “Famously, our branding has defied the category and set the bar for what’s possible in media identities - that’s a lot of pressure.” The challenge was to balance the consistency they needed from a business point of view, while retaining the ‘creative chaos’ that is so inherent to the spirit of Channel 4, and which continues to make them an inspiring brand for creative people and the alternatively minded. 

So, the team arrived at the idea of the infinitely looping number four as the foundation of everything - a concept dreamt up by Mike Skrgatic, co-founder and creative director at VFX company Time Based Arts and creator studio Art Practice - that stemmed from ideas around time travel and portals. The 4creative team reverse-engineered the stories that would fit the concept and all the different worlds they’d delve in. The possibilities, of course, were limitless, hence the five themes mentioned earlier - those would help them make sense of all the ideas together and create the necessary parameters for picking and choosing.

Then, seventeen creators were drawn from the extended families of Art Practice and Love Song - some directors signed to those rosters, some old friends, some photographers and some fine artists to boot. Lynsey says that while some had years of directing experience, others were directing moving images for the first time - this is one of the pillars on which the campaign stood, to create that eclectic mix in a natural way. “We needed lots of different types of people with different kinds of creative minds, all with a different viewpoint on Britain.” But, even with the themes and all the parameters set in place, the team ended up with a pile of 500 ideas, which led to the lengthy process - four months to be precise - of working and reworking until reaching the final set. 

“Initially, we printed every idea we were given onto a postcard - just an image and a title,” says Lynsey. “That meant phones were turned over and we spent hours sifting through physical things - initially sorting into piles of ‘gold’, ‘silver’ and ‘bronze’. The gold ideas were visuals we felt we hadn’t necessarily seen before and importantly didn’t feel like ‘idents’.” 

They then pinned up sets of five cards, sorted under five different themes to give them the necessary structure and sense of grounding. Once everything was up, a lot of switching and swapping took place, with the ultimate goal to create a set of 25 idents that brought a balance of tone, scale, urban vs rural, colour palette, time of day, animation, live action and CG. “It was like an enormous jigsaw puzzle that also felt like dominoes - move one piece and it affected everything else.” 

This visual really comes through - as we dive through the scenes, we get the sense that there is so much more to each one. A self contained world that naturally leads to another one, while simultaneously contrasting it to build the bigger picture of Britain. According to Mike Skrgatic, the success of the entire project depended on the contrast and richness that only a diverse group of contributors could bring.

Having this many people work on one piece (that contains 25 pieces in it) is no joke - and it means everybody was super focused on their one or two worlds, meaning lots of pre-production love and no ‘poor cousins’ that got left out in the cold. That’s why the result was 25 extremely well thought out and curated visions, each just as good as the other, challenging and complementing each other. “We had to make sure each of the directors felt in control, whilst ensuring the resulting film was coherent and creatively diverse,” adds Lynsey.

“We encouraged creators to start from a place that felt close to them,” says Mike, talking about the character building and storytelling in each unique scene. “We wanted people to be free from the artifice of advertising and aim for truth and honesty in realising their ideas. It was important to Channel 4 that we feature real people and portray a vision of Britain beyond the confines of London. Glasgow also brought a fresh take on what we’ve seen before and offered access to wilder, more dramatic landscapes, which added an awe-inspiring scale to the idents. We live on a beautiful island - hopefully these films reflect the less populated parts of our land as well as the more obvious.”

According to Lynsey, the scene that took the most production time and power was the ‘Friday Night’ scene directed by The Romantix that sees a fractured group outside of a nightclub at the end of the night, frozen in time. “The cast, the wardrobe, the hair and the props all needed to stay completely still as the camera moved through the scene, which doesn’t happen by accident. It was one of our bigger casts too, so figuring out that jigsaw meant it passed through various iterations.” 

Another hefty side of the production was the design led by production designer Arthur De Borman, for instance the working railway made by Mattes & Miniatures, the details of which were being crafted for weeks ahead of the studio shoot. In terms of surprises, Lynsey admits that it’s never easy to pitch a scene involving funeral flowers next to your brand’s logo, even if they’re your colleague. “So, kudos to the powers that be in Channel 4 marketing and beyond who let us go for it.”

To achieve that visual diversity through both context and craft was paramount - hence the mix of media, which was an artistic and a practical decision, as it gave the team a chance to explore themes and scenes that wouldn’t have been possible with pure live-action. “For instance, you can’t stick a motion control rig in the middle of the North Sea, so ‘At Sea’ became an amazing feat of CGI directed by Mike Battcock at Time Based Arts.” But more on that later. 

For the live-action scenes, another important detail is worth noting - casting was vital for creating an adequate representation of the nation. 4creative cast over 70 faces, none of which were actors, from across the UK through both agencies and street casting. The choices of talent were particularly important for the representations of culture where it blossoms most - in the home, so that the scenes could feel intimate and natural, such as the Zoroastrians celebrating Nowruz, or the father and son on the beach. “Those are real families,” adds Lynsey. “The couple you see laying in bed together have been together for 15 years. The school kids signing shirts on the last day of term came in the majority from two schools in the area we shot at in Glasgow. Naturally, as Channel 4, we were looking to represent the fabric of the UK with a blend of age, gender, sexual preference, ethnicity and visible disability across the scene, but on the whole we were looking for characterful faces you’d pass on the street, rather than a glossy, commercial aesthetic.”

While appearing realistic and true-to-life, the piece is still strongly crafted - enter Time Based Arts (TBA), who were in on the project from the very inception of the idea. “Having the artists in VFX helping to creatively problem solve from the start meant that everyone felt a sense of ownership of the final films, but also that moving footage from production to post was seamless. One of the most rewarding parts was watching the creative transitions between worlds come together - the steps of the stately home in ‘Twelfth Night’ blending seamlessly with the ‘Elephant in the Room’,” says Lynsey. So…

Chris Aliano, producer at TBA explains, “Like with a lot of our projects, we were involved right from the start, creating the hero camera move and blocking out a pre-vis which solved how the films all linked together. The pre-vis morphed into a tech-vis, which formed the backbone of the production until the shoot. The VFX team worked closely with Mike, Lynsey and the directors to ascertain layout, set size, positioning and speed of the multiple motion control rigs.” Here, data was essential to program the rigs and make sure they were in the correct position. The team had three VFX supervisors on set to make sure they were moving in line with the CG camera and to collect all the essential data to be used for VFX. 

Once they had a solution for the camera move in CG, they were able to start making the full CG executions even before the shoot. “We did have some help though,” adds Chris Aliano, explaining that Optical Arts and The Line created films which TBA received fully rendered. Then, the team stitched the finals into their timeline and graded and mastered as part of the VFX process. 

The hardest parts, according to Chris, were camera tracking, stabilising and lining up all the material to create that seamless loop that became the backbone of the narrative. This was the most challenging job, not only on this project but from any project they’d done, for the team - “A lot of footage had to be rebuilt, timewarped and re-projected to make sure the loops were smooth and lined up pixel-perfect.” The goal was to end with a film that doesn’t look as though there is a lot of VFX in there. 

In terms of the animated scenes, Nick Smalley, head of animation at TBA explains that the planning and experimentation started months prior to the shoot, with many technical hurdles to overcome through the pre-vis process. What was imperative here was having identical camera animation across all films. Only six of the scenes were fully CG, so the successful use of motion control was a pivotal part of the concept. “The main character animations we were responsible for were ‘Fox’, ‘Elephant and Moths’, ‘All Crowd’, ‘At Sea’ and ‘Surveillance’.” He highlights ‘At Sea’ as one of the most difficult and time consuming shots in 3D, as it involved a great deal of simulation.

When it comes to the edit, the intention was for it to have contrast throughout. According to Mike, unlike a traditional edit where you try to find coherence in the imagery, the team at TBA actively pushed for the opposite. “Variety of method was an obvious pathway, but texture, lighting, scale… acoustics and anything else we could build differences with was encouraged.” Balance in terms of how each idea was achieved took a step back to the idea itself - the idea always led the way through the project. And with 25 of them, the varied and abstract ways to tell the story weren’t lacking in the edit either. “In the end, we had 11 studio set builds, eight locations, five full CG scenes and one animated sequence,” adds Mike. “Each of the shot scenes also feature a CG 4 to further add to the VFX conundrum… a 4 on fire, one buried in the sand, one drenched in rain, one strewn with clothing and on and on and on.”

Ten months in total is what it took the crews to execute the project, with post production starting with pre-visualisation around four months prior to the first studio shoot and six months prior to the air date. But the crews from TBA and beyond loved every moment of it. From the community spirit that the project brought, to the collision of different worlds and disciplines, seeing the project unfold, proved hugely satisfying for everybody involved. Stephen Grasso, VFX supervisor and head of 2D at TBA says: “Solving the problem of executing a very technical task that evolved from a very simple idea, but always at its heart, celebrating filmmaking craft, while broadcasting a wide scope of interpretation on the landscape, culture and social interactions of Britain was incredible.”

For the joint head of 3D Sam Osborne, the huge amount of variety within the project was its biggest strength - “Besides the number 4, we weren’t able to reuse assets or lighting setups like we usually do when working on a job of this scale, as each shot was vastly different. It was one of the most challenging projects we’ve made out of TBA but with that came a renewed appreciation for our craft, our team and how much we enjoy working together.” But the challenge wasn’t only on a VFX level, but also an audio one.

A long-time collaborator with TBA, Will Cohen, supervising sound editor at String and Tins took on this challenge. Mike explains: “The plan was always to have sound design which supported each setup and acoustically altered the visual differences between scenes. We built in accents of music to bridge areas where the sonic contrast became too jarring, allowing VO to sit comfortably on top.”

In the spirit of the project, String and Tins had all of its designers work with different directors adding another level of creative variation to the mix. The project promised to be of ‘considerable sonic scale’, as Will puts it, yet at its core it was bound to authenticity. “A rare thing,” he calls it. “It was extremely rewarding for me to supervise, as every member of our sonic team worked on at least one of the 25 films, with myself guiding the work and finally bringing the sound worlds together in a final mastering session.”

The sound preparation kicked off parallel to the pre-vis where the brainstorming sessions took place with the goal of planning out how to maximise the contrast between each world sonically, while also considering the threads that could help transitions. “The white noise of the rough sea, for example, is what morphs into the hot air fan, or the subtle moth flying through the graveyard might tie into the moths in the glass box.” These notes were then shared with each director and fed into their production. Then, a lot of Zoom calls took place.

Immersion here was paramount - so the project needed to be pushed to the edge of what is possible. “It might seem counterintuitive but getting good production sound was a big step in the right direction,” says Will. “The films were shot in two blocks, a number of days in London in the studio, and a further number of days on location in Scotland. I wrote up briefing documents for the two sound recordists, with detail on which actors we would want isolated radio microphones re: possible dialogue, potential sound effect wild tracks etc.”

For the ‘Shattering Room’ film, Will and his colleague Kaspar Broyd experimented with a super wide range microphone from Sanken that extends the potential frequency capture five times beyond what human ears can hear. This is what was used to record the glass sound that we hear in that film. As it was shot at such a high frame rate, only this microphone could recreate that footage when played at 25fps with a fidelity that still contained full bandwidth audio once slowed down five times. 

This, along with Will’s reworking of Toccata and Fugue by Bach that merges seamlessly into the Zoroastrian New Years sequence, are just a couple examples of the technical and creative gymnastics that went into the sonic skeleton of the films. But for Will, the most memorable part is still recording the spoken words by John Joseph Holt - the 18th creative and the ‘icing on the cake’ as Mike calls him. “He gave meaning to the project that until that session I hadn’t properly realised. Huge respect to John, Mike and all at Time Based Arts, and the 4creative team for bringing this body of work together in the form of the launch film with such honesty and passion,” says Will.

And it takes a lot of bravery to stand behind an honest view of Britain, as well as present it to audiences infused with such a strong dose of creativity and love. But offering an alternative viewpoint has always been a pillar of Channel 4 and as Lynsey puts it, “Giving a voice to the fringes and showing what’s in the darker corners rather than what’s bathed in the light of mass-market sanitation is at the heart [of the brand].” 

Channel 4 has always been a brand that actively wants to push to the boundaries - a rare and special thing, exemplified in this project. And in terms of the creativity level, the bar for the Channel’s idents is already high - “I think I speak for everyone on the project when I say we felt a collective responsibility to make something that showcased British creativity and the creative ambition of not just a group of makers, but of Channel 4 itself,” says Lynsey. 

The hopes behind the rebrand were clear - a Channel that feels like a modern and vibrant canvas for bold and disruptive programming, while simultaneously becoming a mirror of Britain and British creativity, with all its twists and turns. A feat that was so obviously graced with the love and dedication of every single person that worked on the project.

Lynsey leaves us with this: “In a world where arts education is less prevalent and where the proliferation of media continues to deliver quantity over quality, I think it’s incredibly important that someone like Channel 4 remains a flagbearer for what is possible within the creative industry in the UK.”