BBC Oneness - idents and presentation

Oneness is what happens when you put someone highly skilled in one medium to work in another one.

I was rewatching that globe recently and - knowing what I know now about CGI - did think that it must have taken ages to render a whole minute of that in 1991. In fact, probably most of 1990. Seeing that clip was very much a 'well obviously it must have been a model' moment.

Would be great if there's more surviving footage than just that short GIF. It looks like a fascinating kinetic model!

While looking for more, I've found a quick sketch, presumably by the ident's designer, Daniel Barber, on this post by Bail. It appears to be from a book which I actually own but is currently on my desk at work, but I'll have to wait until I'm allowed back in the building before I can have a proper browse of that bit.

Getting photocopiers to work reliably is a sadly unrecognised skill these days.

I thought the 1991 globe was CGI too. I guess now it makes sense why they didn't call it COW2.

LWT’s 1996 ident was a model too, each individual piece of the logo was controlled using a rostrum camera and string.

Indeed the early showings were actually done live, but one night before Gladiators all the strings got tangled up and everything just fell to the floor, causing an embarrassed Peter Lewis to announce “Well, that... was LWT...”

(not really)

There's also the old Eurovision ident, which was made from string.

Well COW was the name of the hardware that generated the ident - and the Lambie Nairn globe came off CRV component laser discs...

as shown by Anne Robinson in this clip from Points of View (along with contemporary viewer opinion of the then-new globe!)

https://www.tvark.org/?page=media&mediaid=115505

I had no idea that a laser disc was so big and that the mechanical globes were so small.

There is something warming about Anne's cheeky comments and wit from her Points of View era, "...after all, I'm not Tomorrow's World", it's charm that the programme has long since lost unfortunately.

COW stands for Computer Originated World though, so the name would fit any CGI globe ident. But if 1991 was a model and 1997 was live action, that means 1985 was in fact the only CGI globe.

It's a 12" disc inside a caddy. Techmoan did a teardown of one a few months ago.

It's semantics but the 1985 to 91 globe was 'realtime CGI', in my mind CGI refers to images rendered in non real time, and a recording made. A la the 1982 C4 blocks