Mayo island at heart of TG4's new ‘Súil Eile’ campaign

TG4 is marking its 30th birthday with a major new campaign, ‘Súil Eile’, celebrating three decades of seeing Ireland differently and looking ahead to the next chapter in the broadcaster’s story.

Among the images featured in the campaign, developed with ‘The Tenth Man’ and acclaimed filmmakers the McGloughlin Brothers, is the football pitch on Mayo's Inishturk.

At the heart of the campaign is a celebration of Irishness, the Irish language and Ireland in all its richness and complexity: its people, language, landscapes, culture and creativity. Moving across past, present and future, the film presents familiar places and ideas from unexpected perspectives, reflecting TG4’s role over the past 30 years in offering audiences an alternative way of seeing and experiencing Ireland.

Deirdre Ní Choistín, director general of TG4, said: “Thirty years ago, TG4 launched with a clear ambition: to create a connection with audiences through Irish language media. 'Súil Eile' was central to TG4 from the very first broadcast on Halloween night 1996.

“Thirty years later, 'Súil Eile' is reimagined in this campaign to reflect the ambition of the motto and to ensure it is as relevant as ever. It reflects the distinctive perspectives and colour that the Irish language and TG4 brings to our understanding of the world around us and a nod to the vision that came from the grassroots movement who sought a dedicated Irish language television service and hoped that would become a reality.

“As we mark this milestone, we are proud of all that TG4 has achieved over the past 30 years and look forward with ambition to the next chapter."

The campaign is rooted in the idea that the Irish language offers more than a different way of speaking; it can also offer a different way of seeing the world. Through striking imagery, inventive filmmaking and an unmistakably Irish sensibility, ‘Súil Eile’ invites audiences to look again at the country they know and discover something new.

Ken Robertson, founder and CEO of The Tenth Man, said: “'Súil Eile' is one of those rarest of rare brand ideas that gets more relevant with age. Thirty years ago it described why TG4 needed to exist. Today, when so much of what we see is shaped by algorithms and increasingly familiar points of view, another way of looking at the world feels even more important.

“We didn't want to explain 'Súil Eile'. We wanted the work itself to behave like Súil Eile. Infrared literally allows us to see something that was there all along, but invisible to the naked eye. Kevin and Páraic McGloughlin took that thought somewhere extraordinary, with Max Cooper's music adding another dimension to it.”

Acclaimed photographer Kevin Goss-Ross said: “It was a real honour to be asked to shoot a series of photographs for TG4, and the trusting partnership with the team at The Tenth Man made for a rare period of creative exploration and freedom.

“For a campaign that invites us to see the world anew through Irish, I started by researching language and its effect on the human brain, explored Irish folklore, and pulled together a selection of interesting techniques to experiment with finding hidden colour in organic ways, and to explore the colour concealed in time and language. I shot two of the images with an infrared camera with a 550nm IR filter which removes visible light and renders foliage in vivid pink tones.

"The first was of a hawthorn tree growing out of a wedge tomb in Loughmacrory, Co. Tyrone, and the second the Kilclooney Dolmen in Co. Donegal. The infrared rendered everything living in bright pinks while the ancient stone remained natural: steadfast while all life around it dies and renews.

“For the third and fourth images I photographed the Crohy Head Sea Arch in Co. Donegal and the incredible GAA pitch on Inishturk in Co. Mayo.

“I used a technique I’ve been messing around with for years but had never quite found a way to make work commercially, which I call an RGB time split. Some of the earliest colour photographs were made by shooting three images of the same subject, with all light filtered out apart from red, green and blue in each subsequent image, and then projecting the three channels through coloured film to combine them. When you make images like this, objects are rendered normally where the light stays the same, but if light changes in an area, a vibrant, unpredictable pop of colour is revealed.

“Just as the ancient Irish language can unlock new ways of seeing the world, this technique brings colour to life as time elapses, revealing something that would otherwise remain invisible by exploiting a quirk of an early colour-photography process.

“On average, I spent around eight hours at each location, waiting for the light or capturing each scene at different times of the day to find the colour hidden in time. I also attached small lights to a drone to light-paint entire landscapes in long exposures once darkness fell, blending the images shot in the evening with those captured throughout the day.”

The campaign is currently rolled out across TG4 television, digital and social platforms, supported by a wider campaign delivered in collaboration with The Tenth Man and Zenith Ireland.