I had the pleasure of working on ‘WTF is Dovetail’ for Channel 4 in collaboration with Acteon. The campaign won the ‘Excellence in Research Presentation' award at the Mediatel Media Research Awards last week. Our goal was to convey the next steps of Channel 4’s ‘4Sales’ tool Dovetail which informs advertisers of their advert’s performance across multiple platforms. The project involved multiple videos, animations and graphic design elements; I worked with Acteon to produce these visuals.

Motion graphics were used extensively to convey ideas and functions; the motion graphics provided complimentary visuals to the narration and script provided by Acteon. I produced these to be compliant with the client’s colour branding and visual identity, keeping a consistent look in the animation to other elements of their branding.

Alongside the animations and graphics I was tasked to video edit many aspects of the project as well. There was a particularly interesting instance where I was asked to use my visual effects skills to alter a clip from Channel 4’s ‘Countdown’ changing the famous letter board to spell out ‘Dovetail.’

This was a fun opportunity to practice several integration practices. I started by taking a still from the video clip to give me a base image to work with. I then removed one of the letters towards the centre and moved the left and right sides of the images closer together to make sure the wide angled perspective on each side of the remained symmetrical. I then painted in the missing parts of the side that this process created. I tracked down a similar font to the one used for the letters and inserted new ones and tilted them to the correct perspective. There were thankfully a couple of opportunities to simply move letters from the old sequence instead of creating new ones. I then added blur, shadows and artifcating to ensure the new letters appeared integrated. Finally, I added a grain effect onto of everything to make it appear that the new letters appeared to actually be part of the original footage.

I had a lot of fun working with Channel 4 and Acteon and hope to do so again soon in the future! You can find Acteon’s press release for this project and related award here:

https://www.acteoncommunication.com/stories/2019-02-22_01.html