Watch Channel 4's amazing Paralympics trailer
Ninety-second Meet the Superhumans promo premiered last night on 78 channels simultaneously
Have you seen it yet? Last night at 9pm, Channel 4 renewed its marketing push for its blanket coverage of the Paralympics with an explosive promo, entitled Meet the Superhumans. The 90-second clip premiered across Channel 4's network, plus ITV1, Channel 5, Sky1, Eurosport and all UKTV channels, hitting a total of 78 channels simultaneously.
The clip, directed by Tom Tagholm for C4's in-house agency 4Creative, won immediate acclaim on social networks for its beautiful imagery and high-octane shooting and editing.
Soundtracked by the Public Enemy track Harder Than You Think, the trailer boldly mixes crunching sporting action with shots representing how athletes competing in the Games might have acquired their disabilities: a mother about to give birth, an explosion in a war zone and a car in a spectacular crash.
"We knew we had to make some noise," Tagholm said. "We knew we had to add some edge and grit and attitude. We narrowed it down to four or five concepts but then someone came up with this line: ‘Meet The Superhumans’. We loved the scale and the confidence of it. So we built up from there to create the strongest, most impactful concept we could get.
"As for the scenes in the middle with the explosion and car crash and the mother in the hospital," Tagholm added, "we thought long and hard about how to include them. One thing that we weren’t interested at all in doing was an advert which said: ‘Isn’t it great that these guys have made it to the start line?’ That just didn’t interest me and I don’t think it interested the channel.
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“What I wanted to do was show that it’s a part of what they are now and a part of their physicality. I didn’t want to dwell on it, just to give a hint, a moment of just how tough these characters have had to be."
See the Meet the Superhumans trailer here.
