According to Buck co-creative director/principal Ryan Honey, the network gave the studio complete creative freedom. “The network’s new manifesto states that they will own action,” says Honey. “Our response was to create action to the maximum, a whole block of :05 and :10 IDs that cast the Spike logo as action hero in a variety of fast-paced scenarios. In each of them, we aim to grab the viewer’s attention and then bombard them with adrenaline-filled action sequences.”
Action Movie, Car Chase, Carformer, Logo Chase and Vegas are all short :05 and :10 animated sequences packed with wall-to-wall action. Action Movie has a graphic-novel look, with an imposing bald man who uses a pair of handguns to shoot up a prison bus. The vehicle tips over revealing the Spike TV logo on its side. In Carformer, an ordinary sedan quickly changes – Transformer-style – into a canon-firing race car, while in Vegas, dice fly and stacks of poker chips come crashing down around the silhouette of a sexy woman.
“These super short IDs can be challenging to create, because there is such a limited time to get your message across,” notes Honey. “The network left it up to us whether to create a new color palette for the network, but we agreed that their existing palette was an extremely strong branding element. We had 11 people working on this project, using a combination of tools, including Autodesk Maya, [Maxon] Cinema4D and Adobe After Effects.”
Cypher Audio Development’s John Black handled sound design.