Elliot Dear directs new BBC ident for the Six Nations Championship

Ahead of the 20th instalment of rugby’s prestigious Six Nations Championship, renowned Blinkink director has presented the tournament’s BBC-aired ident, to the sound of resounding applause from rugger-mad egg-chasers up and down the country. Elliot, who directed the much-loved John Lewis Christmas ad in 2014, has brought his intuitive sense of visual communication to the spot.

With “Wachowski-like flair”, the director used motion-controlled in-camera technology to narrate the story of a dangerous rugby ball that swiftly soars through various household items. Elliot tells It’s Nice That, “The concept for the spot is the mundane, the everyday objects are synonymous with the beginning of the year, which are blasted open by a rugby ball.”

As it isn’t possible to execute “real bullet-time on a small scale”, Elliot and the production team “built models and altered objects so they look as though they are already exploding”. Meanwhile, the motion-controlled cameras shot the static objects with a rotating rig, the director adds, “We then added the debris and particles in post production.”

With the games kicking off at the beginning of next month, the resultant ident catapults the space-like ident into the celestial.