Virtual Set

You can see it on some of the Magners League shows, and it’s also on air for ‘The Hub‘ with a different logo in the virtual screen.

As usual, it was built as a 3D model in Cinema 4D and then painstakingly textured up using my special secret process (which I may reveal as another blog post at some point).

Finally, it was exported as an fbx file which I loaded into tOG (by RT Software) for some final tweaks before the whole thing was zipped up and downloaded by Setanta at their end.

It was a pretty fast turnaround for this one – under a week to get it on air, with a few updates supplied after the first TX.

You can see more images here.

Conference : 10-14 September
Exhibition : 11-15 September

Although I won’t be able to make it over to Amsterdam for IBC this year, I thought I might just give a quick heads up to all you media types that my old pals from RT Software are exhibiting again this year. RT Software’s tOG 3D system is the technology behind some of my virtual studios and many of the real-time election graphics that appear on my site.

RT Software at IBC (RAI Amsterdam) : Hall 3 (3.A59)

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Hairy Bikers

Be sure to watch The Hairy Bikers’ Food Tour of Britain. It’s a 30 part series that starts tonight on BBC Two at 17.15 and is broadcast every weekday over the next few weeks.

Just putting the finishing touches to the graphics for the last few episodes.

See : Broadcast Design for Hairy Bikers’ Food Tour

Read the BBC press release

In response to requests, I’ve created a new set of Weather Icons based on the popular first set. These symbols are essentially the same but are now all PNGs with transparency, so the icons themselves can be used more easily on maps and other backgrounds (the low-res image below shows the icons on some suggested colours).

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Over on the right there you should be seeing a little widget-like thing showing the weather forecast for Lovely Leitrim. (UPDATE: currently disabled). It’s using my own TV graphics-style Weather Icons which you can get here.

I don’t know exactly (yet) how to make it into a downloadable widget that other people could use on their own sites, but if I get time I may investigate how to package it up. At the moment it’s just hard coded into a regular text widget. And it’s also hard coded to pick up the weather forecast for Carrick-on-Shannon, so I expect the appeal might be… er… limited.

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I’ve had plenty of people visiting my site looking for weather symbols to download so I thought it was about time that I actually made some weather symbols of my own.

The problem has been that everyone has been trying to get their hands on the old BBC ones which I ‘refreshed’ slightly as part of the 2005 BBC Weather relaunch. Obviously those symbols are owned by the Beeb, but I’ve been directing people back to the Weather Centre anyway, in the sure knowledge that they won’t be allowed to use them for copyright reasons. One visitor also reported back that they were refused permission because it also might be perceived as a ‘degree of endorsement by the BBC’.

Which is entirely fair enough.

So I decided to design a set of 40 new and unique weather symbols / icons that have a kind of ‘homage to old school TV graphics’ quality to them, but which have been designed entirely from scratch and obviously haven’t taken a single point, line or vector from the originals.

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I was quite pleased to see that the fan trailer I made for an (at the time) non-existent ‘Green Lantern’ movie has been picked up by The Times for a story about the real Green Lantern film that’s due to start shooting in September.

see Times Online – Green Lantern movie: confirmed release date

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Seems the latest version of After Effects from Adobe (CS4) has changed the PAL D1/DV Widescreen square pixel preset.

In CS3, compositions using that preset would be set to 1024 x 576 pixels. The new version (CS4) uses 1050 x 576.

So which is right? 1024 or 1050?

Well, to begin with, it’s all a bit complicated. I can still remember when it was first explained to me many years ago when I was still at the BBC, and it’s the kind of thing that’s quite difficult to get your head around without drawing little pictures on the back of envelopes. Anyway, there’s a few resources out there that try to explain this (links included below) – but I thought I’d have a go myself.

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As part of my Online Video Marketing Services, I’ve just completed a little 50 second web commercial for textatrack.co.uk – it’s been put together entirely from scratch with After Effects, using 3D animations and Photoshop layers. The 3D phone and laptop models were bought in separately and modified by me using Cinema 4D. …read more

Blackheath Village website

A quick redesign for the local website for Blackheath – a lovely little village in Surrey.

Visit the site at www.blackheathsurrey.co.uk

If you have a website of your own – maybe one that was built years ago and in need of a quick ‘refresh’ – please do get in touch. We can copy your existing content over to a fresh new design in no time at all.

As well as a cleaner look, your new site will be optimised for faster loading and better search engine placement. So if your site is looking a bit tired and worn out, contact us for a bit of ‘website spring cleaning’.

Full set of BBC Weather symbols

I’ve noticed quite a bit of traffic coming to my site searching for ‘Weather Symbols’ so I thought it might be an idea to upload the full set of symbols that I made for the BBC as part of the 2005 relaunch. These are based on the original designs by Mark Allen, who submitted the familiar symbols to the BBC in 1974 while still a student in Norwich, and subsequent revisions by BBC graphic designers over the years.

The new set of symbols were redrawn in Illustrator and converted to PNG’s for use in Metra’s Weatherscape system which drives the graphics for all of the BBC’s weather graphics, both the realtime 3D forecasts and all of the web content too. The main changes are to the raindrop, the basic cloud outline and the colour of the lightning bolt. I had designed several possible replacement symbol sets as part of the initial pitch, but in the end there was no reason to change the classic icons – other than a couple of cosmetic tweaks. …read more

3D animating graphics for corporate video

Some example graphics recently completed for Headlines – one of the UK’s leading corporate communications agencies. …read more

I recently completed another virtual studio project for Setanta Sports in Dublin. This set is for their FA Cup programme – it went live on air a week or so ago. …read more

While my favourite G5 was out of action due to graphics card problems, I continued working away on my back-up machine. I’d hardly used the second machine since new – and hadn’t changed the System Preferences for ‘Font Smoothing Style’ – but I was surprised at just how different the text looked.

To show the kind of differences I mean, I’ve taken some screen grabs of some text to demonstrate the kind of changes you might expect to see with different font smoothing styles applied.
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Has anyone else spent ages staring at a spinning ‘LOADING’ image? Watching the little guy spining away – then realising the connection has hung and the upload (or download) stopped hours ago. It’s amazing how a little bit of movement can imply all sorts of activity, which may (or may not) actually be happening.