Vapor Lover goes for a less ”guy-centric” feel.

Tattoo Man, directed Vaughan Arnell, was also designed with an eye toward appealing to a broader audience. The 90-second branding spot follows a young man from the grocery store to his apartment, where he prepares a lavish, if somewhat unconventional dinner party (pig’s head is the main course) where the attendees are his tattoos — among them a devil, a snake and a black widow spider — who leave his skin and come to three-dimensional life. While the creative team fell in love with the idea of tattoos coming to life, finding the right narrative context was a tougher process.

“We didn’t want it to be something destructive,” Guillen explains. “We didn’t want it to be what if your tattoos came to life and robbed a bank. The dinner party was an elegant way to bring it across. This guy isn’t doing something evil; he’s doing something really beautiful.”

Tattoo Man holds one of his guests.

While the IDs and the longer spots utilized different directors and post houses, Guillen describes the production process as being similar. “We don’t want to dictate what everything’s going to be; we want to bring in the best people available and give them an opportunity to put their imagination into these spots.”

It was an easy process, Guillen says. “Once you have a solid concept you can actually go ahead and start something. “The concepts for the spots were worked out and refined in the SCI FI Channel’s New York office. They were then storyboarded and the boards were sent off to Glassworks London office, which told SCI FI what was needed, and “we shot accordingly.” The hardest of the IDs to execute was Merge. The original concept had two wrestlers fighting so intensely, they morph into one. But time constraints kept them from perfecting the effect, so in the final edit, you see their arms merging into each other.

Glassworks was tapped to work on the spots partially because, like Lambie-Nairn, the agency that co-produced the spots, they are based in London, making it easier for them to supervise the work. But Guillen says that European post houses deliver “different quality of work, a different vibe.” Most important was the fact that Glassworks “were able to make it photo-realistic and make the effects part of the story and not the big payoff.” It was important that the spots were “not about the effects, but about the story. The effects just had to convey that story along.” This, he says, is in marked contrast to the channel’s earlier spots, which “were all about the effects. Hardcore 3D, hardcore 2D design, they were all eye candy.”

Many of the IDs have a twist ending.

The new, softer style of spots was accompanied by the introduction of a new SCI FI Channel logo. The old logo, a rather plain line drawing of the planet Saturn and its rings, played right into the pejorative view of SCI FI, Guillen says. “It’s a planet, it’s space, it’s just what you’d expect.” But changing the logo completely would be too risky — “we have a lot of equity in the planet,” he says, adding that “a lot of our core viewers like the idea of a Saturn logo.” To please both constituencies, the channel came up with a stylized rendition of Saturn (“it’s more of an iconographic image than just a ball and a ring”): two curved lines that the station compares with the Nike “swoosh,” that now appears as the station on-screen bug, on the station’s Website and in all print ads. Along with new programming — including a Battlestar Galactica miniseries premiering in December — Guillen says the re-branding has accomplished everything the channel could desire. “We are still providing our core audience everything they love about the channel while expanding the channel’s appeal to people who might not have expected to enjoy it.”

Steven Mirkin is a Los Angeles-based freelance writer. His work has appeared in Variety, The Los Angeles Times, New York Times, New York Post, Rolling Stone, Entertainment Weekly and other publications.