A Decade of Gallery Works

Every now and then over the last 10 years, I’ve have taken the opportunity to post and share work and creations I undertook in my spare time. The last several years have been relatively quite due to my own life commitments taking time away from undertaking further developments and improvements. Some projects were very ambitious and sadly little was ever made, whilst others I took time to tweak the design and add a little uniqueness to the work.

Over the years, the threads became stale and many of the images lost to Image Hosting platforms, and with myself being concerned about data, I also removed links to videos which further showcased the work. The closing of the TV Forum site as made me question my past decisions, and why I struggled to showcase my work and accept the criticisms.

This time, I want to take ownership of my work, and showcase some work that was also not released.



ABC News 2010 Graphics

This project was intended to be an ambitious project undertaken in 2013. The ABC launched their News Channel, and a wholesale change was made to the graphics package. At the time I was boarding in Melbourne and some housemates were wanting to stretch their creative works, and wanted to create News Bulletin updates similar to what was broadcast on TV. Mentioning the work I was undertaking, I made efforts to recreate the ABC News Graphics package.

I had no forehand knowledge about the design cues and concepts, and could only work with what I saw. Sliding Boxes and segmented pictures looked to be the design language, and often, the photos would be replaced depending on the programme. One thing I found lacking was how blurred the graphics looked, even under 720p High Definition, and there were too many static images for my own liking.

I set my challenged to combine these issues and reattempt the design.






I also took the challenge of recreating the Promo Boards and make a Backdrop Template for presenters, where an image can be placed behind the overlays and re-rendered. Taking advantages of After Effect’s Dynamic Layering features.




Lastly, there was the footer banner. It was always a static image, and I wanted to give it some life.
I never returned to this project and 2014 was the last year it was touched.





BBC World Service Breakfiller

Stumbling around David Lowe’s old Member’s Area (Some TVF users may remember that), I came across a shared piece of work called the “Breakdown Music”. It was intended to be played out over the radio if there were ever internal disruptions to broadcasting, and music needed to be played to avoid dead air. Something akin to the Breakdown animations played on BBC World and News 24.

Listening to the music, I observed that the song was broken into music motifs and styles as it played, and reminded myself of the breakfiller Pre-"Dynamic Junctions". Jumping straight into After Effects, I cobbled together a background loop which spanned the length of the song, then started creating Composition templates where I could write up content for each.

The background, I was hoping for the use of the Cat’s Cradle, but could not attempt it at the time, but it sufficed with a dark blue tint, representative of the World Service logo at the time.
At the time, during 2012 I had originally shared by work with the TV Forum community, and got some nice ideas, and managed to incorporate them into the work. The long render times ended up exhausting me and I dropped the work. I have since managed to re-render the work.








BBC Four News

I really don’t remember much about this project. It was undertaken in late 2011, and I was finishing my final year. Gosh I am old. This work is probably my earliest that I ever retained related to TV content, suitable for TV Forum consumption.

It was a take on BBC Four News from 2002. Intending to use the 4 as the symbol of choice for astons and the opening titles. Probably more suitable for Channel 4 rather than BBC Four.

I had the design patterned down, I just struggled to find suitable images, and the footage was too low quality for my liking. Plus it is super taxing on my computer when rendering, even today, as my version of After Effects doesn’t register later versions of OpenGL, nor does it take advantage of GPU processing.








Ten News 1994 in HD

This is more of a recent activity. Stumbling across some old News recordings of Ten News, I had the iconic drum build up I am familiar with, but I never recall the design language, though I found it very interesting, and was reminded was past work. The use of box (all be it on angles), and drop shadows, I knew I could recreate this, and have it up-scaled to High Definition.

This was a fun reattempt. Finding the correct font was not, as something is up with that “E” character, even in the old VHS footage. Where I knew I would struggle with is anything that is 3D, and rendered externally. I can leverage Blender, but having footage super imposed in Blender is a nightmare. So I sufficed for simple shapes in 3D space. Looks not-great, but it’s fine for concept.









A friend of mine requested a Old-Timey News Summary sting.


I really do like the 2019 BBC News Regions. Maybe I can make it fit the ABC News styling. They seem to be using some upward-sliding panels too.

outstanding

You sir have made some impressive recreations of classic idents and presentations.

where's the 1999 map victoria map titles

Absolutely stunning! My fav has to be the World Service Breakfiller. Lovely choice of music too.

By the middle of the decade, and my familiarity building with Adobe After Effects, I wanted to undertake a project. Knowing that some in the TV Forum user-base had a very keen interest in the BBC, and it was approaching a 20 year anniversary of the News Channel, and a very iconic branding, I wanted to attempt the recreate, and upscale the BBC News 1999 design. This meant having to target the National News, News 24 and World, along with the Nations and Regions with their Titles and Stings.

Having never seen the news ever broadcast on Television locally in Australia, and not having access to the World News via Satellite, I could only depend on VHS tape recordings, uploaded to the internet.

This posed several challenges in terms of footage quality:
• Footage may include VHS artifacts.
• Footage would be in various sizes and converted bit-rate qualities.
• Footage colour would not be consistent.
• PAL Widescreen is not the same as 16:9 square pixel widescreen.

This all depends on what the mediums the digitising processes used, and would require lots of various articles of footage to find the happy medium. Before I dive into some of my more recent attempts on this, I should illustrate some of my first attempts with recreating the BBC News graphics.


Early attempts the Regions titles

My first attempt was back in early 2011 and the BBC Regions Titles. I was first learning what After Effects was, and what it could do. Was it a linear video editing tool? A cut down 3D engine? Was it a type of Photoshop for Video? I didn’t know at first, but at the time, it felt more like a more complex version on the Title Creator scene in Premier Pro.

I discovered some 3D animation tools, such as a 3D explosion, and it’s ability to overlay images. Taking away the gravity and explosion effects, I could have an extruded map, and with some camera adjustments, I could make a 3D object spin in space. Overlay some text, colour the shape and build a pulsing ring animation, and I have a quickly knocked up title sequence.

Not very impressive, but something I was excited about given I felt I was breaking new ground, and learning about the power of After Effects.








60 seconds to clarity

Later that year, whilst completing my final year studies, I pushed out two more pieces of work. By October 2011, I started some work on the BBC World 2002 Countdown. Seeing the people had been uploading their VHS recordings of bulletins of this time period, and there was one article of footage that had a almost complete countdown, I wanted to attempt at recreating the countdown graphics, given I had picked up the score online.

I was able to learn the use of Text Expressions, building a numbered countdown from “60” to “00”, which also helped kick-start my programming career, as After Effects takes advantage of JavaScript. My issues at the time were colour transitioning, still the text decoding, and having a repeated grid of numbers across the Composition.

By now, Bail and Mike W began to chime in with tips and pointers with some features and effects After Effects came bundled with. Surprisingly, there advice here is still in use today!

Sadly, no footage remains of this work, and is probably lost to history, even the Wayback Machine can’t help me here!

And now, a summary of the news

But it wasn’t too long before I managed to make another upload to the TV Forum gallery, and it was the 1999 Summary Ident. This one took a little more work, but with the advice from Bail taken on board, I was finally able to fill a missing piece of the Design’s jigsaw that I long missed.

Decoding text. The format was primitive, but it got the job done at the time. The process involved creating a text layer, trying out the text, freezing the time on the layer and adding in a Key for each frame, then alter the text by moving the letters around. As it’s all layered in the composition, I could just duplicate the layer and move it around.

Another feature I managed to take advantage of this time was the use of masks and silhouette layers. Effectively creating a hole in a layer to display content beneath it. Now, I could separate out each design layer in turn and composite all together.

Whilst I no longer have the original composition, I remember the following layout:
• Cream layer with a Dark Red spotlight was the background.
• Tow Circle shapes, one with a hard edge, and another with an opaque soft edge, used as a mask.
• Red background with a orange spotlight, overlayed with a map of the UK shown through the mask.
• The layer text as mentioned before with a layered mask
• A comp with three CC sphere layers, one tinted back for the ocean, another masked with the cream layer denoting the land masses, and another lightly masked with the light specular.
• Finally the large pulasing rings with a mask applied to each and the BBC News logo.



There was some contention around the weight of the C in the logo. I was using a user-created logo, and not the actual BBC logo. This has since been corrected



The string wasn’t perfect, but at the time it was good enough to most people’s eyes and I was quite overwhelmed by the achievement at the time. In that time, fellow members had pointed out in positive criticism about some features I had missed, but noted the poor quality of the footage did hide them from view. This revelation helped spur on more interest in the project.

We’ll be back after this break

By January 2012, I had released the Breakfiller video as noted in an above post, trying to have a go a creating something unique with my own formatting, using some of the pre-existing motifs. Inspired by mtdauk’s work on his breakfiller and interpretations of design, I want to have a go.

I took a rolling development approach to the work. Once I had something patterned down that people could understand, release it and ask for feedback, and take in the ideas and adjust my work.

The video in an earlier post above is the revised version with the suggestions taken in from the TV Forum community.

Didn't you make a mock of the BBC One Clock from 1997? I remember that. I would love to see it again please.

It would be a while before I would pick up another project relating the BBC Graphics. In that time, I would begin to look at more material showcasing the design of the News titles, and I would identify patterns and templates of the package. Knowing that time was approaching on the 20th Anniversary of the relaunch of the BBC News, I wanted to undertake the opportunity to recreate and upscale the graphics, aiming to be as faithful to the original design language and hoping to iron out some of the glitches that ended up on screen. It would be an ambitious project, and would not result in any final video creations until a late stage.



This would have been one of the least fruitful project I had worked one as I had been hit by set-backs after set-backs. I first initially took up the project in late 2014, and began reusing some of my old projects as a base. Starting with the National News sting I worked on in 2012, I made minor adjustments to the scene. Adding in the radio waves, a globe spin in the masked layer, and substituting the text decode with a new text expression, and the use of worldwide city names.



It was later discovered that this shot was shared between the National News titles, and the sting reuses the later portion of the animation.

The countdowns were also a signature piece of the package. I was able to reuse an older project from 2011 and enhance some of the content with grids and text decodes. One of the challenges I faced, as still do today is figuring out how the background colours switch to different patterns. Are there shape objects moving, or is there a rotation of pre-rendered backgrounds the fade between each picture. News 24 would be a little more easier to attempt. The background colours never changed, but the globe animation would be a more difficult composition to piece together.

The numbers were simple enough to animate, but the grid compositions being revealed with a mask would take time. I am yet to tackle this challenge.



With these challenges endlessly frustrating me, I could at least attempt to recreate the graphic backgrounds, often used when showcasing the newspapers, still images or in-bulletin bumper tags. The regions and nations often shared the same patterns with varying colour combinations relevant to their package. BBC World and News 24 also shared their own background images.

World and News 24



Regions and Nations



I also took a chance to tackle some BBC World titles. These would pose the extra challenge, (along with the Regions package) by utilising a 3D shape, spinning and twisting on screen.



Regions had the extra component where the country map would be faintly shown behind the region map. My approach for these 3D animation was to use a 3D software such as Blender to render the object and animation, along with the 2D map in a separate video file, then I can bring both renders into After Effects, and apply a colour composition with the region map as a mask.
My example here took the use of my home state, since I could take advantage of a SVG map into Blender. After Effects did not have any 3D shape extrusion until the Creative Cloud versions were release (nor would it support SVG’s natively until a couple of years ago.

With the BBC UK Regions map, no digital maps (let along an SVG version) exists, so I to the liberty to hand-draw the map in Inkscape and eyeball the maps from each of the regional titles.



And here is a screenshot of the World shape pattern for good measure. I have since been brought to the attention of Element 3D from Video Copilot, which would easily take the manual work away from Blender, as it’s nearly impossible to align the shapes and movements from footage reference.

With all these challenges in place, the only successful render I was able to piece together didn’t happen until a couple years ago when some of the community started to pick-up the BBC News 1999 projects individually, as the 21th Anniversary was closely approaching.
What came out, was this.



This project has been the most difficult to showcase. I personally wanted the quality to be much higher, and with some polish, but often held back because people had high expectations when I began demolishing my work back in 2015. I had set myself a high bar, and some people expected the same. That was a tough blow. What was even worse was that I couldn't continue the work from September that year as I travelled overseas, and left the project stale.
Then life got in the way with finishing my education, and beginning professional work.

But I have always held onto it, ready to resume if the time was right.

Yes, I did post that work, but sadly I will not be showcasing it, as it does not deserve that privilege. Whilst I worked on the clock component, and having it animated, 80% of the artwork involves using a drawing completed by someone else on the forum, and that image grabs the most attention as it a proper piece of art. The clock is nothing special.
I personally failed to credit them (and I still don't know who did that work).

The purpose of this thread is the showcase the effort I put into my animations and visual work from start to finish.

How did you have the place names in the background for the regions I just typed them in but it didn’t work lol

A text layer is what you need. I don't know what your trying to achieve.

All the graphics here which had "background text" was the use of a text layer. A composition mode applied to the (such as Darken or Overlay), and an additional mask shape or composition was applied to the text layer, with the track matte set to either the luminosity or alpha of the mask layer above it.

I think the graphic background recreations could easily work as computer wallpapers...