Grant Gilbert came to Stockport College to give a lecture. Grant Gilbert is an ex – student of Stockport College about 20 years ago and had the same tutor as I do now!
Gilbert is from Double G Studios in London and they are: (Text from http://www.doublegstudios.com/) a London based design company specialising in motion graphics, live action and brand identity. Our process is all about good communication and clean modern design.
Gilbert started out by doing a National Diploma in Graphics which ran for two years then went on to do a degree in at Birmingham UCE he said this was a print based course and was very different from the one at Stockport College which was more motion graphics based.
Gilbert’s first job was at Plane 24 which involved working on the Big Breakfast Show and his roles included doing some auto-que work and making tea! He did this for 3 years. Then saw a job going at Channel 4. In his time there he worked on identities title sequences and channel promos and really enjoyed himself. He stayed at Channel 4 for 3 years. Then saw a job going at the Attic in New York in the year 2000. Gilbert remembers having a lot of fun there but then the office had to close down because it wasn’t doing too well. Gilbert then returned to London and worked as a freelancer. He has been working freelance for 8 years now and likes it a lot because he can move from job to job and work with a variety of people all the time. Gilbert then started Double G Studios a few years back to get his name out there. He finds that having his name in a company in more impressive to clients rather than him standing alone as one man. He runs the company more like a collective rather than a company as he works with other people that belong to the company and prefers to call Double G Studios as a Collective. He then showed the audience a show reel of Double G’s work, the same show reel can be seen below.
video from doublegstudios.com
He decided then to talk about a piece of promo work he did for Channel 4. This was a promo for 4Music. Gilbert wanted to give it a summery, music festival feel to it. Gilbert has had an image of people wrapped up in neon cables on his desktop for a while and he had been waiting for a project to come along so that he could execute his idea. For this piece he was also influenced buy LED screens and displays and this gave a very electronic feel to the promo. There was dancers wrapped up in neon cable and glowing camping tents linking to the festival concept and these elements intertwined to give the feeling of music and represent 4Music.
Gilbert then worked on the More 4 channel identity for Channel 4. He worked with London based company Spin who designed the logo for More 4. Gilbert wanted the logo a living thing and wanted it to have a navigational kind of presence. He started integrating the logo into patterns. The team was under pressure to come up with a colour scheme and eventually decided on one as the pressure mounted. Also the team decided on the simplest layout for the logo with the identity, which worked better than all the ones with patterns in it. The team then worked with The Mill in London on the animation. After the identity was sorted out the team had to come up with a promo for a channel. With this promo they wanted to be provocative so they decided to brand the channel as an adult channel from channel 4, this is because the channel was going to show programming that adults would find interesting. This got a lot of complaints because the public thought that channel 4 was going to start a channel for pornography. Gilbert thought this was a brilliant response to the idea.
videos from recording of lecture at Stockport College
A year after More4 launched they came back to Gilbert wanting him to reinvent More4 again with the existing graphics. So then Gilbert spent about four weeks in After Effects creating new animations. He worked alone on the reinvention.
Gilbert was keen to mention at this point that being a student you get total freedom compared to the real world where you have to work under constraints.
Gilbert then went on to tell us that he was behind the rebranding of BBC1. One of Gilbert’s aims was to get the circle back into the logo that had featured in every set of BBC1’s identities apart from the last set. A requirement of the brief was to keep the colour of the brand red still. This identity can be currently seen on BBC1. The cost of the rebrand was heavily criticised by the media saying that £1.2 million ‘s worth of the TV licensing money from the public was spent on animating swimming hippos. The media had the idea that this was just for one ident but they were mistaken because the money paid was for the entire rebrand including everyone’s labour etc. he concluded in saying that the BBC 1 job was the worst one he had ever done. I think this was because the BBC were so specific how they wanted things to be so it wasn’t a waste of public money.
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