DixonBaxi – bold new UKTV Watch idents

It’s taken a while since they posted up a teaser of the Smoke ident a few weeks ago, but here, finally are all four of the new eye-popping UKTV Watch idents – Smoke, Liquid, Hair & Crystal.

I had a chat with Aporva Baxi from DixonBaxi, to find out more.  He told me that the “Watch” channel had had a bit of a repositioning since HarrimanSteele did their idents a few years ago.  The new feel is more about “exploring the extraordinary” – with a batch of new shows that back that up very nicely - the highly anticipated Grimm from NBC Universal, as well as JJ Abram’s Alcatraz and Primeval: New World

Apart from the promise of something slightly more mysterious in the idents, I love the juxtaposition of very organic elements – the smoke, the slomo liquid or the hair and the clean lines of the text and the half circle. A sense of something slightly mischievous within a tight boundary.  I am also a sucker for bright colours, which I think are quite difficult to pull off without looking childish, so even if the graphics didn’t look so good I would still be happy! Aporva told me that part the idea was to keep a kind of familiarity to the look, but with a twist of some sort and that the quality of the photoreal quality was about creating something wonderful, beautiful, believable that felt like it could exist but feels unusual and surprising.

DixonBaxi made the decision to do it all in this hyper real CG (done by the rather wonderful Analog) so as to give them complete control.  For example as velocity changes so does viscocity in the Smoke ident.  I have to say I thought that that had been filmed it looked so real, so hats off to everyone for making everything look so vivid.  Here is some more of the thinking behind the look from Aporva: “The new positioning for the channel  is dedicated to giving viewers extraordinary experiences”.   The identity had to have a relationship to the rest of the UKTV family of channel which all appear in a circle. We looked at a lot of logo marks but ultimately developed a the half sphere identity to feel much more iconic, dimensional and confident. The half sphere and WATCH logo type brand the channel, while the other half of the sphere suggests the unknown, the unexpected, the extraordinary.

The idents bring to life an idea we had to create ‘wonderbursts’. Essentially bringing the other side of the identity to life revealing what is hidden within Watch. They are intended to be captivating, disruptive, weird and wonderful”

What do you think? Do you like this kind of bright look for a TV channel and do you think they achieved what they set out to?

The work includes a brand new identity including logo and OSP, new promo toolkit, idents, IPPs, DVEs, blips, and bumpers.   You can find out more from Dixon Baxi’s website here

Credits: Client – Kjetil Njoten, UKTV, Concept, creative, direction, production- DixonBaxi, Ident VFX –  Analog, OSP Production: Beautiful, Sound Design: Massive