BLUE PETER – WAVERUNNER

To design and produce a full graphics package for the Blue Peter Waverunner Challenge. This included maps, astons, wipes, VFX and an animated title. The challenge set for presenter Linzi was to cross the Irish Channel inside an inflatable sphere.  

The Initial Ideas/Pitch

We started this project with a completely blank canvas as the Blue Peter Team wanted us to design a bespoke graphics package. We started by researching the challenge that the team were working on and coming up with some visual styles that we thought would match the tone of the videos as well and things that would appeal to Blue Peter’s young audience.

 

 

When we first sat down to discuss the style and grab a few images for a moodboard the first image that Mike pointed to was the Airwolf titles, this was a brilliant and unexpected starting point that lead us down a rabbit hole past 80’s film titles, early atari games and ultimately to limited palette wire frame graphics.

 

Waverunner logo motion graphics

 

Once we had a mood board together we were giddy to start designing logos to pitch to the blue peter team. One thing that was immediately obvious from our designs was that we were going to go with a light title on a black background, it was going to feature a stylised san serif font and that we wanted to incorporate a wave or sea element into the design. Here’s a collection of some of our ideas.   

 

The Process

We sent the Blue Peter team a contact sheet of our best ideas to peruse and they selected their favourite. We discussed with them what they liked about it and what they didn’t like so much and then we stoked the fires in Tracks and Layers towers and got to work making this graphics package next level hype.

 

 

The first step we took was to take the design into Cinema 4D and give everything some depth. We extruded the logo text and extended the wireframe ocean into the foreground and background and tinted it very light blue. We then modelled the Zorb hamster ball that Linzi would be attempting the challenge in and added that to the finished title board that can be seen below.

 

Waverunner logo motion graphics

 

Adding the animation to this title was fairly simple as the final movements were the subtle movement of the ocean and the Zorb rolling from left to right with each character emerging from the water behind the Zorb. Now we had the title board we could use that to produce all the other graphics using this as the style guide. The list of other graphic elements included: several maps pointing out areas of the UK and Ireland, maps showing different stages of the challenge, a name strap, stylised hero shots of all the key characters, a number of tracked overlays and a final element showing the result. So we had our work cut out producing all these elements but using the title board as a style guide helped massively. Examples of some of these elements can be seen below.  

 

Conclusion 

Overall this was a great project to work on. The Blue Peter team wanted to be creative and ambitious in the look of this challenge. They gave us the freedom to explore different options and we believe it resulted in a series of films that stood out from a lot of childrens content. The Blue Peter team repeatedly commented on how pleased they were with our input.

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