Cutting Edge CGI and Hand Crafted Care: A Tale of Two Idents

Despite being separated by decades, Apple TV’s new ident and Channel 4’s 1982 launch ident both bucked the prevailing trend when they aired.

TV idents are one of the most important things a broadcaster, or today a streaming platform, will ever put before the public. This is the brand summed up in seconds and the way that people will (hopefully) remember where it is they just watched that killer TV show they're about to tell all their friends about.

In other words, a lot of effort goes into them. Which is why these two examples are so interesting. Channel 4's 1982 ident was one of the first mainstream uses of broadcast-quality 3D computer animation. By contrast Apple's new ident, which launched in 2025, is all done in-camera.

Real Apples vs CG Blocks

The Apple TV ident was put together by TBWA\Media Arts Lab to help cement the move away from the Apple TV+ brand. With the accompanying theme composed by an up and coming young musician called Finneas, aka Billie Eilish's older brother and co-conspiritor, it's a stylish five second sting that was filmed in London across several weeks.

"Built from real glass and captured entirely in camera, the new identity explores reflection, color, and light to express the cinematic spirit at the heart of Apple TV. Every shimmer was made for real, no CG shortcuts, a nod to Apple’s belief that craft should be felt, not faked," explained MAL in an Instagram post when the work first appeared last year.

The contrast to Channel 4's work 43 years previously could not be starker. Computer Graphics Imaging was the coming thing and the Lambie-Nairn design team working on the new broadcaster's logo very much wanted to use it to animate colored blocks that made up a number 4. These would fly apart, rotate around each other, and reform the number once more.

The problem was finding computers that could do this. Yes, really. While it is something that could be done on a child's toy nowadays, back in 1982 the design team had to fly to Los Angeles to find a company with powerful enough computers to pull it off. Even then it wasn't a post company, but rather Bo Gehring Aviation, a US aerospace company that was using computer modelling for visualisation purposes.

A 43-Year Age Gap

The contrasts between the two projects could not be more different. One travelled across the Atlantic to find cutting edge technology in the US; the other travelled the opposite way and leaned heavily into multiple craft skills to produce something that could have been far easier produced on a laptop in an airport lounge.

That though, would not have been the point. And while the line about "Apple's belief that craft should be felt, not faked," is as much a part of the brand positioning as the ident itself, it is undeniably cool to realise that it was all done in camera. All it has to do now is last as long as the Channel 4 ident did which, one way or another, was on British TV screens for 14 years until the mid 1990s. That was worth the flight.