The Moving Picture Company: Channel 4

The Moving Picture Company did a beautiful job on a new series of IDs for Channel 4. Building on the success of their previous set of IDs in which the Channel 4 logo is embedded in different environments and revealed near the midpoint of each spot, this new series is just as subtle and just as ambitious as the first.

At the moment, it appears only “Tokyo” is posted on the MPC site, but the entire series actually contains 12 IDs, most of which can be found at idents.tv. A few more can be found on the Channel 4 Sales site.

Technical details from the press release:

“Designer and MPC CG Supervisor, Russell 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 films 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.”

Thanks to Seth for the heads up.