The Olympic Channel produce their own content for their platform as well as revisiting existing footage and news, and some of this original content is branded as an Original Series. These are made up of episodes anywhere between 5 to 30 minutes long, and tend to focus on individual athlete’s stories or focus on a particular community or group. Assets that are created for these series allow for a much more creative approach than some of the more on brand outputs, and we are encouraged to push the narratives behind the show conceptually in our visual outputs.
Gamebreakers
The Gamebreakers show is about how different athletes have pulled through difficult circumstances to achieve Olympic success. The design concept for these assets was based upon the idea of sharp angles that match the design of the logo, and this creates a glitch like effect, emulating the notion of breaking the status quo. Each parallelogram then contains different images relating to the purpose of the asset, whether it be a series or episodic design. These have been designed for one series option and 4 different episodic options, and then transcreated in to 3 sizes, as well as a Facebook Carousel in order to open new asset channels for the IOC and drive more traffic towards the site.
Speedboarders
Speedboarders is a show about a community of Downhill Skateboarders competing at the Kozakov Challenge in the Czech Republic. The design of these assets is based around taking the colours of the show and then adding lightning like marks to indicate the velocity of the sport. This create a playful yet high energy visual style intended to capture the attention of a young audience. An Instagram specific version was also created for the athlete in question to post on their profile, driving a host of people towards the channel due to their high number of online followers.
Foul Play - proactive poster
To further promote the Original Series, I created a poster alongside the billable work for the Foul Play series. Foul Play is a series that highlights the injustice that specific athletes have gone through, and how they thought back against the system. The show focusses heavily on themes of distress, discrimination and the warped justice system available to athletes in their current circumstances. This poster focuses on a piece of episodic content to display focussing on the athlete Dutee Chand and her battle with IAAF and being excluded due to natural testosterone levels.
This poster picks up on the tonal themes of distress, anger and injustice within the show. A full portrait image of Dutee Chand in action has been used and this has then been printed out and distressed by hand in order to capture the emotive expression the athlete would’ve been feeling when left helpless at the mercy of the athletics governing body. To add to this the rips of the borders around the image symbolise the tearing down of discriminatory boundaries of modern day injustice in sports, particularly relevant to Dutee where she has made significant progress in her case. The handwritten copy all over this image takes from direct quotes within the episode, that help verbalise and express the tone of the content, and can textually help to share some of this emotion and context with the viewer who may not originally have seen the show and then become interested.
