Germany’s Discovery Networks-owned DMAX is a men’s lifestyle channel free of brutal sports events, scantily clad women and other machismo clutter. Seeking to bring its diverse array of travel, adventure, technology and other explorative programming to a wider audience (read: women), DMAX began planning new branding based around real people having real experiences. Subtlety would be a focal point, though a concept dreamed up by Devilfish Creative, based only half-jokingly on a certain Hollywood alien’s ability to become invisible, went a little farther than the network had intended.

The London-based agency pitched a series of idents that would, according to Devilfish creative director Lee Edwards, turn the blocky DMAX lettering into “the Predator logo,” blending it seamlessly into an array of destination-oriented backgrounds. “The only criticism [from the network],” Edwards continued, “was, ‘We can’t see the logo,’ and we said, ‘Yeah, that’s what we want! We don’t want people to see the logo!’ Which was very exciting for us, but [DMAX was] slightly more apprehensive. I mean, nobody doesn’t want to see their logo.”

In the end, however, DMAX came around to Devilfish’s idea, which does resemble the “Predator” film’s alien effects to a degree, but ultimately uses an entirely different kind of visual effect to create something much more intriguing. Where the Predator simply takes on the same image as whatever is behind it and essentially disappears into the background, Devilfish turned the DMAX logo into a mirror of sorts, one that rests in the middle of the background and reflects a scene occurring opposite it, behind the camera/viewer. In theory, turning the logo into a giant outdoor mirror seems like a simple notion; in practice it creates a visually tantalizing experience, somehow both tranquilly beautiful and mind-bogglingly complex as the mind tries to makes sense of what it’s seeing.

“What’s nice about it is that you don’t even really see [the logo] if it’s on the move,” said Edwards. “It’s the way it moves and the way it comes in that defines it. If you look at any frozen frame, it does become slightly difficult to read. But then [the idents] were never meant to be used in print. They were always meant to be shown on TV and on screens where they’re moving. So it was quite an interesting aspect, that you can’t see [the logo] when it’s static, but when it’s moving it gradually reveals itself.”

Edwards said that “in an ideal world, we would have just made the thing out of a big mirror and done it for real… but the cost of that would have been prohibitive.” Instead, Devilfish shot the landscapes for each ident live-action, tracking backward then bringing the mirror-logo in later using motion graphics. For the footage “reflected” by the logo, the crew brought the camera around to face the other direction, shooting the movement (a hiker going through the woods, kickboxers fighting in a garage, etc.) and inserting it onto the letters in Cinema 4D. The Devilfish crew made sure to choose locations where “the sun would be behind us,” said Edwards, “so when we’re tracking back we see the blue sky and then when we spin round and we see the action, the sun’s happening behind that… when we composite those two things in 4D you get this feeling that it’s directly behind you, so it feels more like a mirror.”

Ideally, Edwards continued, the shooting would have occurred using a motion-controlled rig as well, but “we couldn’t afford it, so we had to put track down and use a crane, and then post-stabilize a lot of it.” In a cursory glance of the idents, the logo appears to be gliding into the shot, but in actuality, “the logo should always feel like it’s just there and we find it” as the camera moves back, Edwards said. “We didn’t want for it to feel like it was getting bigger or smaller… which sounds easy but is incredibly hard to get the camera moving the right way. We had to set up stands with a cardboard logo and then practice the move, and then take the cardboard away and then repeat the move and hope it was the same move we’d been doing for the rehearsals. But you can never be completely sure so it was always a bit of a gamble.”

Fortunately for all parties involved, the gamble paid off.

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