hey!, a design and production studio, finished new opens, bumpers and background elements for five History Channel shows. The firm created an open for SPY WEB, revised opens and bumpers for HISTORYS GREATEST BLUNDERS and WEAPONS AT WAR, and opens for MOVIES IN TIME and HARDCOVER HISTORY. For SPY WEB, hey! used a mainly gray palette and added bits of color to evoke a feel of coded messages. "We had this coding going on in a textured background, with letters that cycle and change and evolve into the SPY WEB logo," said creative director Laura Tolkow. "We also utilized footage featuring different types of surveillance and letter-coding machines." MOVIES IN TIME is a series which brings a panel of experts together to discuss fact and fiction in historic films. "We essentially spliced the footage to create a filmstrip in a time line, as it were, and there is a really nice feel to the open which affects the sense that things are projected with light coming through graphic sprockets," said Tolkow. For HARDCOVER HISTORY, hey! transformed the History Channel logo into a parenthesis and propelled it into space along with other 3D punctuation and elements, like books. For HISTORYS GREATEST BLUNDERS, Tolkow said, "Our challenge was to give it a completely different feel from The History Channels other show, MILITARY BLUNDERS. Our approach was to make this open abstract and really focus on the human element because nearly all were the result of someones rather unfortunate oversight. So, we worked with typography, using key phrases like miscalculation, words that explained the actual errors that led to one of HISTORYS GREATEST BLUNDERS, and by showing human aspects such as facial expressions or a navigator at the wheel of a ship." In the WEAPONS AT WAR, the opening is from the point of view of a gas mask, scrolling past the history of weaponry.
Rick DeMott
Animation World Network
Creator of Rick's Flicks Picks
