It’s always nice to see my BBC weather graphics getting an outing with a new presenter.

Yes, somewhat bizarrely, that’s Prince Charles weather presenter extraordinaire during a visit to the BBC in Scotland yesterday.

Seems he did a pretty good job – you can judge his efforts for yourself over here on the BBC site. By all accounts it’s also causing quite a stir on YouTube.
 

I’ve been puzzling over this for a couple of days now. *

I’d noticed that the new BBC Weather website was using a different colour for the sea on their maps.

I’d originally designed the weather maps with a deeper blue for the sea, so I was intrigued to see the colour had changed to a paler, less saturated, and slightly more ‘greeny’ blue (some of the more ‘greeny’ blues I’d previously reserved for light rain).

One of the first effects I noticed was that the actual colour on screen for certain levels of light rain over the sea was virtually identical to that of light cloud.

I suppose it’s just a small point really. It’s still fairly obvious where the rain is – but I was just a bit puzzled as to why a (presumably) cosmetic change to the sea colour should have made the rain data in particular so much more ambiguous and obfuscated.

Anyway – I think I’ve figured out why the new maps don’t look quite right to me. …read more

BBC2 Wednesday May 25th 2011 at 4:30pm

Don’t forget to check out tomorrow’s episode of Little Howard’s Big Question on BBC Two at 4.30. Digital compositing by Mike Afford Media and Made In Colour.

Tomorrow’s episode is called “How Can I Be in Two Places at Once?” and among other things sees Little Howard try to attend an exciting Custard Expo and a boring wedding at the same time. And if that wasn’t awesome enough, he also runs into a robot version of himself who opens up a portal to a parallel universe. Come on – robots, parallel universes and custard… what is there not to like..?!!
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Titles and content sequences for The All New Adventures of Flannel Alan – a brand new reboot of the original ‘Flannel Alan’ children’s TV show.

The characters from the original series have been completely redesigned and updated, and most of the show is now 3D animation instead of live action and puppetry.

The graphics were made using Cinema 4D for the 3D bits, and composited in After Effects.
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Election Graphics, Virtual Reality and Swingometers

So, they’re off! The 2010 Election Campaign starts now, and while most people will be wondering who’ll be in No.10 next month, I’m wondering who’ll come out on top in the Election Graphics stakes.

The last BBC Election programme I worked on was back in 2006, and there’s a part of me that misses the excitement of a live election broadcast. Often weeks, months (sometimes years) of work all come together for one almighty extravaganza. A nail-biting marathon of TV graphics where the entire programme is only a power-cut away from disaster.

I notice the BBC has launched its Election 2010 website – and among other things they already have a nice interactive swingometer here with a neat explanation from Jeremy Vine for the uninitiated.

There’s a possible hint of the Election night graphics by way of a branded banner at the top of all of the Election 2010 web pages : party-coloured discs or buttons radiating from a central point.

It’s hard to say whether this is ‘Campaign’ branding, or ‘Election’ branding – I would guess by now that the various departments are all working to the same design guidelines by now.

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Well, OK. That’s not strictly true.

For starters, the BBC Election Night programme in 2006 didn’t use REAL holograms. But then neither did the recent CNN election special.

For the secrets behind the CNN programme you should visit the VizRT website where it explains the process of using 35 HD cameras and a bunch of Viz boxes to place a real person into a real studio with a fuzzy border around them. …read more