Concept and creative process
An ident designed by Fen Field for Christmas 1984 on BBC One. She envisaged a traditional Christmas scenario with Santa delivering parcels in the snow and an inquisitive robin flying in to unwrap a parcel that had dropped from Santa’s sack, to reveal that it contained the BBC One Christmas logo. Fen decided to use a traditional cel animation approach, using an illustrative technique. After discussions with animator Brian Larkin, she produced definitive finished key illustrations in a loose, sketchy style, which would enable fast production of the artwork needed for all of the frames in the 10 second sequence. The music was in a house style familiar for presentation stings at the time and simple for the animator to follow. Brian Larkin produced the in-between line drawings for a filmed pencil test. All the remaining in-between finished illustrations were drawn by in-house animators at Animation People.