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While there isn’t an Oscar category for title design yet (the proposal was rejected in 1999) it shouldn’t stop us from looking at the Academy’s own opening credits.
Personally I think TCM’s creative and mesmerising take on the movie montage would have served as a much more eloquent introduction to the 80th Academy Awards.
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My first New Zealand related post! These two idents come from TV2, which is part of the state-owned TVNZ corporation. And while it is a public broadcaster, TVNZ accepts advertising, which along with other commercial activities makes up 90% of the networks revenue.
A look at the channels line up draws immediate parallels to the Seven Network in Australia, except for Scrubs actually being in prime time (which makes it even more embarrassing that JD doesn’t know where New Zealand is), and the anomaly that resulted in NZ somehow broadcasting episodes of Men In Trees before the US.
- Thanks to the whole TVNZ team for supplying the videos.
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I’m not sure this tradition quite has enough traction for me to continue with it, but when I turned 21, and then again when I turned 22 I posted the latest Bravia ads.
Well I’m 23 today, so here it is, the two latest ads, Pyramid and Play Doh.
All these advertisements from Sony have always reminded me of the kind of installation art Christo and Jeanne-Claude are famous for, and if they weren’t ads they would probably make spectacular idents.
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Considering the last seven posts on this blog are all ABC related, its probably time for something different. Thankfully a new look Sky Three went on air last week in the UK.
Sky Three is a free to air digital network available throughout the UK, and is meant to be an accompaniment to the subscription only Sky One and Sky Two channels.
While it seems an odd proposition for a subscription service to launch a free to air channel, presumably its programming and promotion is meant to encourage take up the pay only services, I guess it would be like Australia’s Fox8 launching a free to air Fox9 in a bid to increase subscription television take up?
Check out Sky Three’s old look, and more of the new look here.
- Thanks for the videos Craig.
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While I was a fan of some of the old ABC2 idents, and am still getting used to the new ones, something about the network that always left me unimpressed was the murky-green-water theme that dominated their promos and other on-air branding. The new ABC2 however has got a fresh coat of paint, and with its bold use of red, green and orange gives a distinctive look, that for me at least gives the network a feeling of independence, and some even footing with ABC1.
The new look was developed by Tactic, check out what they did to ABC1 here.
UPDATE: It turns out the ABC has never had a unifying channel brand like they’ve just adopted, and whats on-air right now isn’t the gold standard that was intended (the third video above for example), so while whats on-air catches up with what was intended, check out the screenshots below for an idea of what we should expect soon.
Continue reading ‘The red, the green, and the orange of ABC2.’
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While the new idents make up just part of the ABC1 look, another major factor is the on-air branding of promos and other broadcast materials. The task of developing a new look was left up to Tactic who came up with “a ‘toolkit’ of over 200 channel branding elements including colour palette selection, font selection, on-air promo packaging, supers and menus… The new branding provides the foundations for the ABC to create and produce their own promos and on-air elements.”
Tactic didn’t come up with the new logos, they were supplied by the ABC, but they did do the rest, and while the red, white and blue initially confused me a bit, its beginning to sink in. It’s certainly distinctive and very clean, qualities I tend to find appealing.
Check out the new on-air branding from Tactic for ABC2 here.
UPDATE: It turns out the ABC has never had a unifying channel brand like they’ve just adopted, and as mentioned in comments earlier whats on-air right now isn’t the gold standard that was intended, so while whats on-air catches up with what was intended, check out the screenshots below for an idea of what we should expect soon.
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ABC2 got its best bit of PR to date on Friday when ABC TV formally became ABC1 and reminded, or alerted people for the first time that there was in fact a whole other channel available from the National Broadcaster.
Like everything the ABC does, the old look of ABC2 had its hits and misses, some of my favourites from the previous set of idents are here, but again they were far outweighed by all the ordinary ones.
Now though we have a whole new on-air look to dissect, and the first thing I thought when I saw these was… hey, its ITV4! Back in 2005 ITV4 used a similar split screen device to create visual puns, ABC2 on the other hand seem to be using the split screen to highlight various juxtapositions, city-nature, young-old, casual-professional etc. Which is fine, although it completely falls apart about half way through and I find myself wondering what two girls drinking a milkshake is meant to represent..
Comments in a previous post have already pointed out the similarities that the first of these ABC2 idents above have to the video clip of “Concrete Boots” by After The Fall, check it out and see what you think. It’s a good song either way.
Then finally, to dislocate the entire series a little more they’ve introduced two other idents (below) that are based on “parkour“, the ‘art of displacement’ which again is a fine concept for a series of idents, but why only throw in two of them.
I guess what I’m saying is that I like consistency and a central theme to my idents, something that can be explored and developed, not just random images linked at times, but then not at others.
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(The idents were produced by zspace, who also did the new look ABC1.)
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I was desperate for the ABC to do something exciting when they relaunched their on-air brand today, but as yet I’m not sure if they’ve done it. While its a no-brainer that the national broadcaster needed to bring its channels into line with each other through a name change, the actual substance of the new look is where I am slightly less convinced.
From a technical and production standpoint the idents for ABC1 are on par or better than the rest of free to air to Australia, and while conceptually anything is deeper and more meaningful than ‘We Heart TV’, I guess I was expecting something grander and more profound than what I saw when I turned on the television at noon.
Visually the idents share a couple of characteristics with a series Channel Five in the UK ran early last year to celebrate its ten years of existence. In a similar style to what ABC1 has done they mixed live action with animation and in the case of Five contrasted the realities of life working in television against an evolving backdrop of child like imagination. And while the Five series cleverly aligned a networks tenth birthday to that of a child’s birthday through the animation, I’m unclear as to what the ABC is trying to achieve with a similar concept.
With all that said however, any criticism of the collection so far is from a perspective of international comparison, a comparison the average viewer will not be making, and when compared solely to local competition these idents and the new look in general is simply stunning, and will strike a chord as uniquely ABC.
I couldn’t agree more with Kim Dalton’s assertion that the national broadcaster is “embracing true multi-channelling”, and by taking an alternative path to that of other Australian networks is truly building a future and extending the longevity and purpose of the ABC in a landscape where other media organisations are looking downhill towards their own demise and irrelevance.
(The idents were produced by zspace, who have previously worked with the ABC to produce this earlier set of idents as well.)
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