Production: RDF
Director: David Johnson
Channel: ITV
Presenter: Bill Bailey

Bill Bailey presents wildlife in peril for ITV.

In ‘Wild Thing – I Love You’, presenter Bill Bailey and his team of experts are investigating the plight of animals being threatened by a particular local problem. They travel all over the UK in search of critters in peril – from a family of otters in Newcastle who need an otter sized bridge built under a main flyover to stop them from being killed on the road, to an endangered group of porpoises in Cornwall who are under serious threat from fisherman’s gill nets.

The ‘Wild Thing’ team have only a few weeks to meet the challenge and try to engineer an ingenious solution to ensure their survival? Can they do it? Or will our furry friends still be under threat?
This 10 part series required a large amount of graphics to explain location, the details of the problems facing the animals; as well as the specifics of the imagined engineering solutions. For instance, we need to demonstrate how bats use hedgerows to navigate, before we can understand that the removals of large sways of hedgerows to accommodate a large gas pipeline in Wales, will have a devastating affect on their habitat.

Yugen’s illustrated characterisations allowed these graphical pieces to be both informative and fun for a Sunday evening family audience. All designs were produced in illustrator and animated in After Effects.