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TV promo: Dispatches - The Wonderful World of Tony Blair (Channel Four)

TV promo for Dispatches - The Wonderful World of Tony Blair (Channel Four)

Director: Damien Chicken

Chicken is the director of the production company Unbroken Productions and worked as director for 4Creative, Channel Four’s commercial creative department. Chicken was responsible, as director, for the on-air promotion of the Dispatches documentary programmes. The Dispatches documentary about Blair’s post-prime minister’s commercial activities was mired in legal issues and was therefore very late being delivered, so no footage was made available to Chicken in time to create the on-air promotion. The programme questioned whether Blair, who purported to stand for ethics and honesty should be so vague about declaring the means by which he made his money. The aim of Chicken’s promotion was to offer a compelling glimpse of the programme’s content. As with all promotions it required an extensive vocabulary of effects and techniques to tighten and condense information. In this instance Chicken decided to take a script-led approach. The script was written in conjunction with the Commissioning Editor and was fine-tuned following close consultation with the Legal Department. In parallel with this, Chicken devised a simple, arresting graphic image that best described Blair’s contradictory behaviour, centred on the concept of a very slow visual transformation of his portrait, using a macro-zoom, which took place over the entire duration of the script, the full transformation only revealing itself at its very end. The high resolution image of Blair and the Middle Eastern bank notes were sourced from a picture library, they were composited using a combination of Adobe After Effects and CGI, and the final online edit done in Smoke. The promo was extremely well received, with the Executive Producer and former Channel Four Commissioning Editor, Peter Grimsdale, requesting an advance TX copy he could tweet to BBC and C4 executives and colleagues.