Hasta La Motion!

"The initial branding concept was the idea of a box unfolding," says RIOT Atlanta’s Creative Director Jeff Doud. "We took that concept and turned it into a 3-dimensional theme. We brought the idea of social connectivity and the sense of community that Halogen is trying to build to the existing graphic elements.”

Lead animator Deron Hoffmeyer used Adobe Cinema 4D and After Effects packages to build out a 3D version of the connecting boxes and combine carefully selected images of people from a cross-section of ethnicities to demonstrate Halogen’s worldwide reach and the types of socially-conscious, community-oriented projects the network intends to highlight in its programming. All the material was file-based and delivered to the South Carolina-based client via ftp.

The rules of branding for the 18-34 demographic that Halogen is most interested in have changed drastically in recent years, Doud explains, because most viewers are surfing the net as they watch TV. "Traditionally, when somebody promotes a show," he says, "it starts with a promo and then at the end it has the call to action: ‘Tune in tonight at 9PM.’ We think of those things as roadblocks to the continuous streaming of content that this generation expects. They can basically bounce around and surf all media all the time, so why should TV be different? We don’t put anything up there that would interrupt the flow of the picture and the content itself so promos and bumpers always appear as lower-third devices on top of clips from shows.

"We realize that the traditional kind of promo where you stop the flow of content to give people information just won’t work with this generation," Doud concludes. "And we kept that in mind at every stage of building Halogen’s on-air branding."