With eight new sports-based digital channels joining an already growing number of sports specialties, broadcast design studios report that sports nets have become the biggest consumers of 3D animated promos, station IDs, intros and bumpers. And although industry trends adhere to a pendulum-like pattern, one thing always remains: the challenge to imprint brands on viewers’ brains.

The competition is so fierce that independent broadcast design studios such as Toronto-based Tango Media Group have often found themselves working for rival channels – sometimes simultaneously. Tango created a BDA Award-winning opener for TSN Baseball Tonight at the same time it was doing an intro for CBC Sports’ Toronto Blue Jays broadcasts.

‘We wanted to make sure they were both aware of it,’ says Christian Castel, Tango president. ‘You don’t want to try to stick your head in the sand and pretend nobody will know. They will eventually, and you don’t want an unhappy client.’

The design concepts mirrored the networks’ respective images: the well-entrenched CBC and the younger TSN.

‘In the case of CBC, we were designing everything around the concept of old-timers and the tradition of baseball,’ Castel explains. ‘The TSN one was based more on the technical aspects of baseball – precision, power and mathematical equations.’

The TSN opener incorporated purpose-shot footage and images from actual games, on top of which Tango created and superimposed virtual 3D graphics. For example, an overhead shot of a player’s path around the bases was highlighted graphically, with a wall of data appearing behind him that quantified statistics such as his velocity and torque.

Despite the popularity of 3D, the look of 2D vector-based Flash Animation is a hot trend, exemplified by CBC’s 2002 Winter Olympic Games coverage. CBC’s Olympics graphics, which were shared by TSN, were dominated by flat, solid colors.

‘People are always on the lookout for something new and different, and [Flash] is probably considered more hip, although every [look] comes and goes,’ Castel says.

To some, this style seems like a step back, as Flash was originally designed for animation for the lower-bandwidth Internet. Ironically, however, designers are using high-end 3D graphics systems to achieve this more basic retro look. This gives animators the option of making a 2D surface appear to exist in a 3D plane.

Established brands

The diginets have advantages and handicaps in terms of broadcast design; on one hand they are often spin-offs of established brands, which provides a strategic starting point, but they are also usually challenged by smaller budgets and less experienced staff.

Leafs TV and Raptors NBA TV, which launched in the fall, went to Toronto animation and F/X studio Soho to help come up with their on-air looks.

Soho used the Leafs’ trademark blue and white and the Raptors’ purple, red and white as the basis of the stations’ color palettes. As always, marketing dictated the graphics approach, explains Tony Cleave, Soho’s creative director and head of broadcast design.

‘In order to launch the channels, they had to figure out who their audiences were,’ says Cleave. ‘For Leafs TV, they have a demographic skewing older, but they don’t want to alienate older viewers who want to appear hip and current. At the same time they want to attract younger viewers.’

Combining the old and the new in its promos, Leafs TV plugged in the hockey franchise’s most memorable images from the 1930s to the present on 3D animated ‘screens in space’ created by Soho. A puck falling down the center of the frame marks the shifting timeline of the images, with the Leafs logo on the puck changing to illustrate its evolution through the years.

Soho has also renewed its collaboration with CBC, completing design packages for CBC Sports Saturday and the network’s hallmark sports opener, ‘Home of the Champions.’ The studio provided an on-air package for CBC’s relaunch four years ago as well as an animated intro for the venerable Hockey Night in Canada. Then, in a cost-saving measure, CBC decided to keep broadcast design work in-house. This has been common practice among networks, but when they find their resources maxed out or want an influx of fresh ideas, they reach out again to independent shops.

In-house graphics

Since TSN was taken over by CTV, the parent network’s in-house graphics team has handled most of its design. Some see TSN’s redesign last summer as a reflection of ESPN’s ownership interest in the network, but Jon Arklay, head of creative services at CTV, says it was more about tying TSN to CTV.

‘We looked at all our sports properties and found the CTV sports brand had very little recognition value, so we eliminated it,’ says Arklay. ‘TSN is now the sports brand on CTV, so all CTV’s local stations use TSN supers and graphics in their sportscasts. TSN is where the equity is.’

The TSN look also carries over to the French-language RDS and CTV diginets ESPN Classic Canada and WTSN. But the diginets target a narrower demographic and therefore each has a somewhat distinct look. While red and black are the main colors of TSN, ESPN Classic uses gold, and WTSN, for a desired fresh look, relies predominantly on white.

Such decisions come easy when a network is extending its own brand – it’s dealing with someone else’s brand that’s tricky.

‘Because we’ve had a long-standing relationship with ESPN, they didn’t involve themselves at all as to how we branded ESPN Classic Canada, other than the logo,’ Arklay explains. ‘NHL Network was certainly more involved, and we had to be conscious that they have their own branding strategy and it didn’t necessarily relate to the TSN brand.’

Arklay describes the results as a hybrid of the two brands. TSN’s primary color of red was kept in the graphics, but in part as it fit into the colors of a hockey ice surface: red, white and blue.

A common theme in sports nets’ promos is pushing the content’s ‘big spectacle’ appeal, pumping up the audience with aggressive, fast-moving clips. Rogers Sportsnet, however, takes a somewhat different approach.

Whereas TSN has WTSN, a sister diginet that broadcasts women’s sports, Sportsnet has to try to appeal to both sexes on the one channel. The station puts show hosts Jody Vance and Hazel Mae upfront in its promo pieces, believing that the women anchors will make female viewers feel more included and also be attractive to men.

Sportsnet’s promos take on a playful rather than testosterone-driven tone, with show hosts interacting with graphical dots, known as ‘flying Smarties,’ in the blue and red of the channel’s logo.

‘For our brand we’ve tried to be very contemporary, fun, youthful, urban and even hip,’ says David Ballingall, VP marketing Rogers Sportsnet.

The regional Sportsnet Pacific, which runs half of the Vancouver Canucks games, shrewdly incorporates Canucks players into its IDs featuring the channel logo.

‘This reflects what we do best, which is provide home-team content, which draws home-team fans, and in particular major-market fans,’ Ballingall says.

Sportsnet has an April 1 relaunch date for its sportscentral news show, with a look that will feature more of those flying Smarties.

Says Sportsnet creative director Theresa Warburton: ‘With this new animation we want to be entertaining and say, ‘We’re going to put it all in front of you, so just sit back and enjoy the ride.”

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