Jump 25 All Time Top Sequences – 2nd Place
The titles we created for C4 Rio Paralympics 2016 came 2nd in our competition to find your all-time favourite sequences designed by Jump.
This sequence got a fantastic response when it was first broadcast and went on to become Jump’s second ever BAFTA win. It picked up the BAFTA Award for Best Titles & Graphic Identity in 2017. You can watch Richard Norley, Lee Jacobs and Callum O’Reilly picking up their bronze masks and being interviewed about the project here.
Lee Jacobs – Senior Art Director at Jump:
“It was a very open brief. We were given a lot of creative freedom from Channel 4 and Sunset+Vine. We wanted to keep it true to the Paralympics being in Rio, so we employed a Brazilian artist named Gabriel Silvera to come up with an authentic look for us. Instantly it felt incredibly resilient. We had two great animators, Harriet Gillian and Sabine Volkert, who brought those illustrations to life and gave it the wow factor that we all expected from Rio.
Part of the idea was to take our athletes from London, and deliver them to Rio with colour and life, and tell a bit of their story. We were introduced to those athletes at London 2012 and in Rio we really saw them flourish.
When you are working with hand drawn animation you have the freedom to do whatever you want to do, so you can take footage from the past and really bring it into the present.”
Callum O’Reilly – Senior Designer / Animator at Jump:
“Working with Harriet & Sabine was amazing. Everything they hand-animated was a joy to composite into After Effects. Because hand animating each scene took a very long time, we were quite tight on time, so I was given the task to create the hurricane scenes based on the artwork by Gabriel. We were quite far along at this point, so I had to match the hand-drawn animators’ style using a mix of Illustrator & Cinema 4D, a very vector-based software. So that was challenging and fun!
It was a passion project. Everyone involved spent many long antisocial hours animating, fine-tuning, and adding more and more detail because we enjoyed it so much. The final result shows how much passion & love the team had for it I think.”
“I remember that Ellie was initially boarded with a dolphin tail, but that idea got scrapped mid-production and we had to come up really fast with an alternative. So the abstract water sequence was an impromptu solution, that worked out really well though in the end.”
“My main memory will always be looking over at Sabine, head down, hair over her face and sparks flying from her wacom! Ha”
Clyde Holcroft – Creative Director for Channel 4 of the Rio Paralympic Games:
“For the Rio Paralympic titles, we wanted to focus on the athletes. Lee at Jump originally presented a brilliant concept that would require filming with some of the British Paralympians. We realised that their time is so tight and we would have to look to archive to achieve the idea. At every stage, Jump was able to deal with the many challenges thrown up whilst still staying true to their original concept. They did this with passion, patience, incredible skill and very hard work. The end result was stunning.”
Lee Jacobs recaps further:
“What quickly gets forgotten in the glow of a big win is the sheer amount of hard work and extra hours that go into a job like this. Gifted with incredible concept artwork, the animation team were inspired to go the extra mile. As soon as Harriet and Sabine saw the quality of the illustrations, it almost became a requirement to honour Gabriel’s work in the way we brought it to life. For example, there would have been countless ways to animate the many hundreds of feathers that appear behind Jonny Peacock, but Sabine knew the very best way to do it was to create each feather individually, which is what she did. It is this attention to detail and dedication to the art of animation that makes this sequence what it is.”
Rio Paralympics 2016 was a Sunset+Vine production for Channel 4.