Channel 4 - Gameboy Ident

Initially I had wanted to do an E4 sting, but I ended up drawn to the Channel 4 ident for various reasons, the main one being the fantastic ‘exploding’ logo which was used inter-broadcast in the late eighties and early nineties. This was one of the first times that I had ever been exposed to obvious, ‘real’ 3D graphics in an everyday setting. Another reason was the channel 4 logo itself; beautiful, angular and timeless – bested only by the ‘more 4’ logo aesthetically.

Recently the BBC (mainly BBC three and BBC four) have been showing technology specials. TV shows on the evolution of technology, gaming and the future have been aired, each with their own idents. For example, three concentric rings of cameras, each from a different period, would spin and whirr as cogs in a system, all around a vintage TV showing the old test-card and the name of the upcoming show.

I decided to try and capture the essence of this whilst still building on the ‘stacked’ nature of the channel 4 logo.

I constructed the Gameboy using block modeling, working in sections from reference and high-resolution photos that I found online. I re-did the screen, changing the dimensions to accommodate the ‘4’ and changing the decals on he model to “Channel 4 ™”.

I rigged the buttons and directional-pad to bend and click correctly and positioned cameras to capture all sides of the model. Some cameras are keyframed to pan and zoom over various parts of the model.

The game screen itself is an alpha’d .png lying under the png of the screens border. All tetris pieces are on separate planes and were manually keyframed. They were all created in photoshop.

The plastic material of the Gameboy’s casing was procedural, while the decals and screen were overlaid on planes to cut down on the modeling and the polygon count of the piece.

The ident was edited and composited in Adobe Premiere and all sounds were obtained from soundsnap.com and youtube.com.

I'm not *all* that happy with it, but I had to adhere to the deadline - this is the result!