Responses by Graeme Haig, creative director, Superunion
Background: This project is the next stage of our work for ARTE, a public Franco-German TV network that promotes culture and arts. We created three broadcast stings, or idents that punctuate the end of the program and the start of the ad break. These are the latest reinterpretations of ARTE’s identity, previously created by our team. The idents are inspired by the idea of ARTE as Europe’s culture magnet, as the ARTE logo attracts various different subject matters towards it. Each five-second sting intrigues and inspires the audience to connect with the brand.
Reasoning: We wanted to give the original creative idea—“Europe’s culture magnet”—a fresh reinterpretation. As the stings were launching in summer, our new designs—the urban skate park, the petri dish and ice caps—reflect a summer mood, rich in color and a play of light, which adds to the emotional warmth we experience at the height of summer.
Challenges: Generating hundreds of ideas for new reinterpretations of ARTE’s identity. Our concepts had to be true to the original idea, but also be new, exciting, playful, emotive and a bit more extraordinary. From a multitude of sketched ideas, we streamlined our choices down to the three stings you see today. The finished results may be simple, but a lot of thought went into generating the ideas that make them so effective.
Favorite details: It’s been a real honor to work with ARTE’s creative director, Cécile Chavepayre, who was an inspiration for the poetic nature of work as it unfolded, from developing concept ideas with us, to creating the idents that intended to truly wow the audience. And of course, the proudest moment was seeing our hard work come to life on screen when the stings went on air.
Visual influences: The world around us became the real inspiration for this project. We wanted the design concepts to be grounded in reality to put an emphasis on the idea of ARTE as a culture magnet. This enabled us to inject a bit more surrealism, as the more real the environments were, the more extraordinary the experience is felt. This approach carried on through the production phase. As with all the ARTE moving image work, the animations were rendered to feel as though they were real, everyday experiences—making the final results more unexpected. This did, however, make the animation stage harder to execute, compared to if we were going for a less realistic result, as we had to really pick apart how the particular objects would move as if they were being acted upon by an invisible magnetic force.