GLOBAL – Channel 4 has launched 4Creative’s latest campaign to promote this year’s ‘killer night of fundraising’ Stand Up To Cancer, the partnership between Channel 4 and Cancer Research UK.
4Creative’s defiant approach to the film’s subject matter represents the turning point reached in the fight against cancer, with as many people now surviving as dying from the disease.
John Allison and Chris Bovill, Heads of 4Creative said: “We wanted to create something that would empower people to stand up and throw cash in cancer’s face. We did this by literally giving cancer a face. An unpleasant, pathetic, terrified and destroyable face. Then what better way to show the epic destruction of cancer than by utilising all the tropes the modern disaster has to offer. In your face cancer.”
Channel 4 premiered the film to TV viewers during The Last Leg on September 5 before rolling out into cinemas across the United Kingdom. It was also broadcast across more than a hundred commercial channels on September 7, including the ITV, UKTV and Sky network of channels.
Commissioned by Channel 4 Marketing’s Charlie Palmer, the idea was conceived by 4Creatives’s Senior Art Director Pablo Gonzalez de la Pena, under the creative direction of Chris and John.
The two minute animation, brought to life by multi-award winning Nexus Directors Adam Foulkes and Alan Smith, with sound design by Factory Studios, sees cancer personified in such a way for the very first time. The cells live in a world of endless construction reflecting the ability of the disease to spread aggressively and relentlessly.
The film pays homage to disaster movies but with a flip – here the world that’s caught in the grip of a lethal outbreak belongs to cancer, and it’s humans that are causing the chaos: Payback Time for cancer.
A mysterious blue substance begins to contaminate the cells’ world, leading to catastrophic destruction. The end reveals this has all taken place inside a laboratory petri dish, with a human scientist introducing a blue drug into the cancer colony – “Time to die, cancer!”
Claire Rowney, Director of Stand Up To Cancer UK said: “The Stand Up To Cancer animation truly captures the energy of this year’s campaign and shows how our fight against cancer is at a turning point. Stand Up To Cancer is an opportunity for the entire UK to come together to accelerate new cancer treatments to UK patients and save lives. As the animation makes clear, we are making huge progress and winning the fight but there’s still so much more we need to do. More people are surviving cancer today than ever before, and that’s down to research. This year we hope that the nation will support Cancer Research UK and Channel 4 by getting involved and raising money for the Stand Up To Cancer campaign. We want the nation to help us defiantly tell cancer, It’s Payback Time.”
Nexus directors Smith & Foulkes said: “The initial brief was to turn the table on Cancer, depicting the disease as a civilisation spreading aggressively – unable to prevent its own Armageddon in the style of a disaster movie. The main challenge was how to visualise the Cancer cells. We wanted to steer away from the obvious route of showing cells as a bunch of grotesque alien germs, but we were also acutely aware of not making them too human or cute.”
“We also had to find a way to illustrate the new therapies, drugs and scientific breakthroughs that are fighting Cancer. We wanted their arrival to be initially magical and mysterious. so we used a glowing blue orb, an unexplained light descending upon a shadowy world,” they continued. “Disaster Movies rely heavily on vast visual spectacle and a cast of thousands, so working within our time constraints we decided to recreate this using 2d matt paintings to show a sense of the city without having to model every building. This gave it an illustrative and richly textured feel. Modelling and animating our cast in 3d gave us the flexibility of performance we wanted, and made them stand out from their environment.”
Client: Channel 4 Television / CRUK
Product: Stand Up to Cancer
Title: ‘Payback Time’
Length: 120”, 90”cd, 60”cd, 40”cd, 20”cd
Agency: 4Creative
Creative Directors: Chris Bovill / John Allison
Creative: Pablo Gonzalez de la Pena
Agency Producer: Shananne Lane
Group Business Director: Olivia Browne
Business Director: Kuba Wieczorek
Group Marketing Manager: Charlie Palmer
Marketing Manager: Daisy Mount
Production Company: Nexus
Director: Smith & Foulkes
ECD: Chris O’Reilly
Producer: Tracey Cooper
Production Manager: Fernanda Garcia Lopez
Technical Director: Dave Walker
Art Director: Daniel Burgess
Design: Renaud Futterer
Character Modeler: Sohrab Esfehani
Character Modeler: Denis Bodart
Modeler: Margherita Balestri
Animator: Dominic Griffths
Animator: Sergei Shabarov
Rigger & Animator: Paul Tempelman
Animator: Benoit Lecailtel
Matte Painter: Adam Willis
Matte Painter: Yohann Auroux
Texture Artist: Camille Fourniols
Texture Artist: Alex Veux
Texture Artist: Roxane Martinez
L&R: Michal Firkowski
L&R: Denis Bodart
L&R: Francois Mancone
L&R: Camille Fourniols
L&R: Jeremi Boutelet
Compositor: Elliott Kajdan
Compositor: Rob Ward
VFX: Claire Pegorier
VFX: Thanos Topouzis
Editor: Paul Hardcastle @ TRIM
Grade: Mike Skrgatic @ Time Based Arts
Sound Design & Mix: Anthony Moore, Dan Beckwith & Tom Joyce @ Factory
Sound Producer: Lou Allen @ Factory
Music Production: Company: SIREN
Music Producer: Sean Atherton & Sian Rogers
Music Composed by: Alex Baranowski
Music Production Company: SIREN
Music Producer: Sean Atherton & Sian Rogers
Music Composed by: Alex Baranowski
Live Action Production Company: 4Creative
Live Action Director: Keith McCarthy
Live action Producer: Shananne Lane
Director of Photography: Christopher Sabogal
Live Action VFX: MPC
Live Action Grading: George K @ MPC
