CCTV Rebrand
CCTV turns over a new leaf.
900 million regular viewers, China’s most popular children’s channel, an organic overhaul, odes to culture and China’s historic artistry, a rich tapestry of fantasy worlds, a family adventure, leap and slide, turn over a new leaf to iconic IP.
The CCTV team required a complete overhaul of their branding, from the logo for the channel to OSPs, to menus, to credit lists. But beyond just the specific deliverables, the ambition was to create a world for the brand to inhabit.
The Art&Graft team also flexed their narrative expertise, fashioning a series of promos encapsulating CCTV’s values of family-first and harmony with nature, and seamlessly blending 3D environments and live action. Playing with compositional structures found in traditional Chinese tapestries, the team created 3D environments with disproportionate perspectives and intricate use of negative space.
"CCTV Kids is the channel that every child in China grows up watching, it’s in the collective childhood memory of over one billion people. So rebranding the channel was no small task and no small amount of pressure. But the team rose to the task at hand delivering an enormous set of motion deliverables that feel like they tap into both the cultural past of the country and the playfulness of that future generation."
Tom Bromwich, Head of Production at Art&Graft
CHANNEL IDENTS
ON-SCREEN PRESENTATION
CHARACTER DEVELOPMENT
The CCTV team required a range of branded characters to reflect the values of the brand and guide viewers through the channel.
Viewership on the channel ranges from babies and toddlers right through to teenagers and young adults and therefore CCTV needed a lineup that engaged this wide age range. Rather than develop 3 unassociated sets of characters, the studio team conceptualised one, the nuclear CCTV family, which was then adapted for the three age targeted sections of the channel. Beginning in 2D for infants, the family evolves into 3D and then into an anime-adjacent style for the pre-teens. The viewers could then grow up alongside these branded characters over the years.
Credits
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