BBC 5 Live Breakfast gets an energetic new promo courtesy of director Caitlin McCarthy

BBC 5 Live Breakfast has just got a new promo courtesy of director Caitlin McCarthy – the animator behind larger-than-life projects for Pop Tarts and Adult Swim. The film, produced by Strange Beast, visualises a range of talking points from the show, including the cost of living crisis and the state of British politics. Energetic transitions and hand-drawn freneticism are key parts of the work, “reflecting the fast moving nature of the world today”, Strange Beast explains.

For Caitlin, the project brought a change in direction. “The style of this project was quite different to my usual looser more hand-drawn stuff,” the animator tells It’s Nice That. The main challenge was to create a fun world that didn’t stray too far into “childish” territory. Though the character design helped keep things “feeling adult”, Caitlin says, the animator asserts that establishing likenesses for hosts Rachel Burden and Rick Edwards was another new experience. “We went through looooads of iterations of each character to strike the balance between recognisable but not too detailed.”

The final work merges clean outlines with a more expanded colour palette for Caitlin, bringing in both acidic and muted versions of typical colour choices to “make it feel a little more unexpected”. She adds: "I hadn’t quite worked out how I was going to approach the colouring and shading, so we ended up trying out a few different approaches before we landed on a system that worked. My clean-up crew were very patient while I figured it out, God bless!”

Part of the project entailed visualising complex, timely issues – including rising prices in the UK – with expressive visuals, so therefore sensitivity was another consideration point. It’s something Caitlin attributes to the team at BBC Creative who wrote the script: “They were helpful at pointing out any blind spots I had to make sure we were relating to people, rather than making light of serious issues.”