How The Mill Design Team Rebranded Al Jazeera

Visualizing Values

How The Mill Design Team Rebranded Al Jazeera.

By the time The Mill Design Studio pitched their ideas for idents for Al Jazeera English, they had already been thinking about the project for nearly a year. While the London-based studio is known internationally for its design work for all types of media, they were excited about the opportunity to do something creative for a news channel. “Especially one we believe in for telling straight stories without a lot of filtering,” recalls Will MacNeil, the CG designer director on the project. 

Using a combination of Cinema 4D, Houdini and Redshift, the team created five unique idents, each with a theme representing Al Jazeera and what the Middle East-headquartered channel stands for: resilient, raw, revolutionary, fearless and diverse. “We did a lot of research on Al Jazeera’s history and thought about its future to come up with the five values for the channel, says MacNeil, explaining that Al Jazeera also wanted the new idents to maintain the brand’s identification with nature. “Showing things like the sea, mountains and sand without looking too much like a desert.” 

Maximizing Creativity 
Though the idents look as if they could have been filmed, four are fully CG and the fifth, called Resilient, was created using altered stock footage and a CG wave. To help build the vast amount of scenery they needed, the design team used Quixel Megascans, which worked well with Redshift. "The bridge from Megascans supports Redshift directly, so it plugs in easily and all we had to do was customize their high-quality scans the way we needed to," MacNeil says. 

To give the team more creative freedom, a different artist led the making of each ident with each team following a set of rules, so that everything would be cohesive. MacNeil was in charge of the one called Diverse, which speaks to the idea that voices are as unique as grains of sand and together those grains make up humanity itself. 

"It was a really tight team," he recalls. "Three of us handled about 80 percent of the actual work, and that’s partly why we used Redshift. We realized from the start that no matter what the story or scenery was, the structure of the idents had to remain the same" That's why, before they roughed out scenes or cameras, they all locked down the structure of the videos, nearly to the final frame. 

"Having some choices taken away at the beginning of a project like this really helps because you don't have to consider so many variables," MacNeil explains. Working together with Art Directors Anthony Fieldsend and Nikita Shestakov, MacNeil talked over the project thoroughly and created a lot of animatics and very simple animations so they could see how everything was feeling before really digging in. Ross Urien, a creative director at The Mill, did the original style frames for the Al Jazeera logo, which were intended to be subtle and blend in with the environments. 

It was a small team for a project of this type, but MacNeil and other members of The Mill Design Studio team wanted to do things that way this time. Doing that, though, meant it was very important that they figure out how to jump back and forth between Cinema 4D and Houdini, and render very quickly in Redshift. "We’ve had Redshift in the studio for about two and a half years, but we didn’t start to use it vigorously until we started mixing C4D and Houdini," MacNeil recalls. "That's when we realized it was our best option because Cinema 4D and Houdini renders look the same, so we can easily mix and match things from both systems."