Just a quick heads up to say the new Mike Afford Media promo reel is finally online. You can choose to watch it here on mikeafford.com which should be viewable (thanks to the miracle that is HTML5 with Flash fallback) on most browers and certain shiny smartphones. Or if you prefer you can always head over to the Mike Afford Media YouTube Channel and watch it there, or check the slightly higher quality version over on Vimeo
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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.
Swingometer
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.
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.
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
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
