Virtual Studio Sets

Recently completed – a brand new virtual studio set for Setanta’s iTalkSport show that launched on Friday.

iTalkSport is a late-night sport discussion programme and the set prominently features views of the Dublin skyline.

This virtual set project consisted of two main challenges – designing and building the actual structure of the set, and putting ‘live’ shots behind the presenters and guests.

It was a close call whether we would be using four permanently mounted roof-top cameras to feed the backgrounds. In the end we went for a less expensive (but more complicated!) solution. The whole thing is running on the RT Software tOG VR system, isn’t dependent on the weather, and has the uncanny feature of rendering street-lamps invisible.

I’ll give a full behind-the-scenes glimpse later on, but for now, here are some grabs from Friday’s show.

iTalkSport - Virtual Studio Set

iTalkSport - Virtual Studio Set

iTalkSport - Virtual Studio Set

iTalkSport - Virtual Studio Set

iTalkSport - Virtual Studio Set

iTalkSport - Virtual Studio Set

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.

That certainly wasn’t the case back in 1992, when I was responsible for providing the Election campaign graphics for the BBC 9 O’Clock news – the graphics for the Election Night special were so much ‘under wraps’ that we had to design everything from scratch, and the only ‘nod’ to the big night itself was the ‘92′ logo.

9 O'Clock News Swingometer 1992

But the 1992 Campaign, and more specifically the US Election graphics that I designed later that year, did mark a turning point for BBC Election graphics. As New Scientist reported in 1992, these were complex computer graphics, generated live, at broadcast quality. Apart from revolutionising the way Election data was presented on screen, it was also a reaction to the inevitable wasted effort of pre-preparing graphics for scenarios that would never materialise on the night. The BBC press release at the time stated that “Presenter Peter Snow will have more than 200 graphics to choose from for Decision ‘92, the Presidential election broadcast, compared to the 5000 graphics prepared for the British general election in April – though only 6 per cent of those were used.”

BBC Swingometer 1994

Although the 1992 graphics used SGI machines, the ‘live’ elements were keyed over pre-rendered 3D backgrounds, so this really was a leap forward. Possibly one of the reasons too that the Election graphics in 1994 got me my first Royal Television Society award nomination.

Looking back on it, more startling is the fact that these graphics were rendered in HD. The reason for this was to keep the images nice and crisp even when the camera zoomed in to Peter Snow’s back-projected screen. If memory serves, the output was rendered at 1920×1152 – which is probably something like analog HD. Anyway, I’m fairly sure it wasn’t 1920×1080.

It was also the first time that Peter Snow’s swingometer appeared in 3D – showing the coloured MP’s and percentage swing in the normal ‘flat’ view and displaying the outcome (’hung parliament’, ‘majority’ etc) on an outer edge.

The swingometer was to remain pretty much unchanged for the next few years, culminating in the famous Election night of 1997, which saw both a Labour landslide and the smile being wiped off Michael Portillo’s face.

BBC Swingometer 1997

We also had a full 3D House of Commons which filled up with little MP’s depending on the forecast numbers as the night went on. Of course, this isn’t what you’d call ‘virtual’ in any sense – the graphics were all still being back-projected.

There’s a useful reference page on Election graphics at TV Ark – it looks like Sky embedded their presenter in a ‘virtual’ Commons chamber – I forget now how well it worked – those early virtual graphics seemed always to be plagued by the feeling that the presenter was lost in his own green-screen world with very little idea of what was going on around him – gesturing half-heartedly towards what (he hoped) was the right bunch of people. Interestingly, that Sky graphic from 1997 seems to show the Conservatives as the largest party – I’m not sure quite what’s going on there.

By 2001, the pressure was on to ‘go virtual’ – but still we steered clear of dropping Peter Snow into a complete green-screen swamp, and instead provided him with a virtual swingometer and virtual House of Commons that appeared magically on a (real) table in the studio. The 2001 swingometer was essentially the same structure as before, but turned inside-out so that it sat within a hollowed-out table-top.

Swingometer 2001

Of course, the ‘Holy Grail’ of Election night graphics remains a truly convincing virtual reality House of Commons chamber. My secret sources at the BBC are hinting at something pretty spectacular this time round. The graphic technology is being supplied by Brainstorm – a Spanish company that I worked with on the 2006 Election Special – technically very good, and a really nice bunch of guys too. I know the graphic design team has been working away furiously for months now – I’m keeping my fingers crossed that it all goes well for them on the night.

Good luck everyone!

Memory Lane

Here’s my showreel of some of my graphics from various BBC Election programmes. The music is by Rick Wakeman – the extended remix he made for us in 1997. Listening to it brings back many happy memories, and a little lump to the throat. Thanks and best wishes to everyone who worked with me on these.

more old BBC showreels here

And of course, don’t forget to visit Booth B24 and have a chat with our good friends at RT Software.

RT Software develops and supplies PC-based real time 3D graphics solutions for broadcasters. These solutions are aimed at sports, news, elections, interactive TV, virtual sets and for playout graphics.

Visit the RT Software site now for Real-time 3D graphics broadcast solutions.

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.

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.

BBC Hologram from 2006

On my own site you can read some of the background behind the 2006 BBC Election Holograms – whereby we placed a real person in an entirely virtual studio (which matched the look and feel of the real studio next-door) and introduced a number of graphic ‘projections’ which were, of course, just animated textures designed to look a bit like Princess Leia from Star Wars.

The BBC production was put together on a bit of a shoestring budget (luckily enough for the licence payers), but we were fortunate enough to pick up a Broadcast Designers’ Association (BDA) award for the ‘Ascent of Tory Man’ graphic sequence.

The reasoning behind the use of ‘holograms’ in 2006 was three-fold. The production was already going to be using the Brainstorm VR system. We were also looking for something that complemented the night-time feel of the programme – ideally ‘lighting up’ the graphics in some way. Lastly, I was keen to make an obvious visual distinction between the virtual ’studio’ elements and the virtual ‘content’ elements (i.e. the analysis and the results) – so the flickering ‘projected’ quality of the images was extended to include the histograms, line graphs etc, while the surrounding VR studio was designed to look as much like the real discussion studio next door where David Dimbleby was hosting the main programme.

Election Hologram

Anyway. I’m not suggesting that what we did in 2006 and what CNN did last week were the same thing. For one thing, we were only inserting flat graphic elements as opposed to real live people. The image of Tony Blair here appeared as though it was being projected somehow into the studio space, but obviously if the camera panned round the back we wouldn’t see the back of his head. Still, I think we did a pretty good job of faking a holographic ‘feel’.

I expect that CNN could quite easily have embedded the ‘holographic’ people seamlessly with the real studio, rather than fuzzing them up a bit (actually it ended up just looking like very poor keying – probably intentionally). But unfortunately if they’d made it look more professional then no-one watching would have noticed anything strange or clever at all, and might have been tempted to think – what on earth was the point of all that????

Actually, come to think of it, what was the point of all this??