Concept and creative process
The BBC2 Curve ident 'Dark' was conceived and created by the German
artist Helmut Breineder. He wrote some notes about his concept and its realisation:
“The initial idea for this ident was to create a forest scene, looking up
through dense dark branches against bright back light. After visualizing
this concept, we felt it looked too realistic and familiar, and decided to go
for a more abstract approach, but with a similar atmosphere and mood.
After looking for other additional references in the natural world, we really liked the look and movement inspired by sea anemones, which I already had experimented with previously. Sea anemones are a kind of half-plant, half-animal genetically speaking, which was a great match to use as a basis for creating something that causes a weird and unpredictable sensation. Combined with a black and white and high contrast look we managed to achieve the type of suspense and dark mood we were after.
The growing motion was achieved by utilising a technique called particle
advection, where particles are set in motion by a physical-based smoke simulation, which are then traced to create the growing trails. An additional turbulence field added a slight waving motion to the scene. We ended up making the tips of the tendrils a bit square-shaped, to make it more unnatural and ingest further strangeness.The tools used in the creation of this ident were Cinema 4D in combination with XParticles,
and finally rendered in Redshift."