4mations idents

4mations (also spelled "Four-Mations") was the name of ananimation-focused strand that aired on Channel 4 through the nineties. Its original ident was made by David Anderson, director of the Deadtime Stories for Big Folk shorts, and re-used the armature of the title character from his film Deadsy (this background detail comes courtesy of Clare Kitson's book British Animation: The Channel 4 Factor, as does the above sketch)








At some point the ident was retired for a selection of new ones. I don't have the exact date at hand but it seems likely that the change occurred in 1996, when the channel ditched its multi-coloured logo (which lent the original 4mations ident its colour scheme) and adopted a plain white one - see The TV Room for more on this.

Here are two of the later idents. I don't know who animated them, but they remind me a lot of a later set of Channel 4 idents that were made by animation students; I'll be covering those in a later post.




































See this post for more.