Drama, when done at the highest of levels, doesn’t just entertain and inspire powerful feeling, but changes the way viewers see the world. And for many viewers, BBC is the first place they turn to find that kind of content, a fact that has clearly informed the name of the network’s new drama channel: BBC First.

Trollbäck+Company partnered with BBC to craft BBC First’s brand identity for the channel. The creative agency came up with an elegant way of expressing the idea of shifting viewpoints onscreen. Using shifting panels of lenses and light, the resulting on-air graphics compel the viewer to observe the content through different points of view.


“When you put the BBC lens over your line of sight,” said Trollbäck+Company executive content director Elizabeth Valleau, “things change. They become more mysterious, they become more intriguing, more visceral, and you feel like your perspective is being changed.”

But where Trollbäck+Company’s window into the channel is fairly literal, what it reveals is anything but.

“We know audiences love British drama for its sophisticated storytelling and complex, multi-layered characters,” said Amanda Hill, chief brands officer for BBC Worldwide. The content available on BBC First is “intellectually stimulating and emotionally rich,” she continued, and gets viewers “thinking and feeling in equal measure.”

Trollbäck+Company’s BBC First imagery honors the complexity of BBC First’s content without obscuring it or distracting from it, with a clean, elegant on-screen package (OSP) and idents that draw on the emotional power of great drama. Favoring poetic ambiguity over hard-hitting storytelling, the agency’s spots depict isolated moments of powerful feeling that are stripped of a larger narrative context. In one, a car speeds restlessly through the night. In another, an eerily lit girl dashes into the woods.

“One of the things that was in [our] pitch and stayed all the way through the branding process, was the notion of being haunted or possessed by a great story,” said Valleau. “Sometimes it’s not even the story arc. It’s a moment in the story that really lingers with you… a turn of phrase or a tiny moment, a look. Often those moments are not super specific – there’s not a great big plot twist. It’s a moment where there’s so much vibe, it really speaks to you and sticks with you.”

The shifting thematic layers of the spots were mirrored by a multi-layered production approach as elaborate and artful as any acclaimed drama. With master director of photography Fred Elmes (whose eerily beautiful cinematography has graced films by the likes of David Lynch, Ang Lee and Charlie Kaufman) on board, Valleau’s team shot the spots once… then shot them again, as projections. A special rig custom-designed by visual effects expert Christopher Webb allowed them to capture both a rear-projection and a frontal projection of the original footage, and then manually layer the images over each other, “like it was happening against two canvases,” said Valleau.

At that point, Trollbäck+Company proceeded to bring in its glass-pane OSP element… manually.

“We had the images bouncing off big panes of beam-splitter glass that were on little roller skates,” said Valleau, “so when you look at the idents and you see these multiple exposures happening and you also see these big panes of glass that look like the OSP floating across the screen and splitting the images into panes, that’s all real glass, real projections. It’s completely analog.”

The in-camera, hand-made technique extended all the way into the idents’ depiction of the BBC First logo, which became one of the panes of glass itself, so that “anything it’s sitting over will be manipulated in that cool chromatic way,” said Valleau.

The magnitude of difficulty in Trollbäck+Company’s approach came from the agency’s desire to not only express “the craftsmanship and the manipulation of light” found in great drama across “the classic decades of film and photography,” said Valleau, but to “create a brand that was worthy of the beautiful content [BBC creates] and worthy of the BBC brand itself.”

The below offers a behind-the-scenes look at how Trollbäck+Company accomplished all of this.

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