Mighty Nice for SBS

In an attempt to brand itself as the source for a wide range of cultural and educational programming, Australia’s SBS hired Mighty Nice to push the envelope a bit. The most recent fruits of these labors are a series of slapstick IDs that originally aired during Ashes 2009, a long-standing, wildly popular cricket series between England and Australia.

Slapstick is hard enough to pull off in live action, but to manage it with composited animation is a feat worth applauding. The comedic timing between the actor and his unseen props is perfectly in line with the cartoonish spirit of these spots—a cartoonishness brilliantly offset by the elegant end tags.

For a much more abstract take, Mighty Nice also created a set of idents that interpret SBS as shifting tableaux of form and color inspired by the sounds of SBS.

Although created for the same client, the visual and conceptual distance of these idents from the Ashes spots is a testament to Mighty Nice’s flexibility as a studio.