Prime Focus London

BBC1 Circle Idents

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After four-and-a-half years, the BBC has replaced its "Dancers" channel idents for BBC1 with "Circle" themed sequences. Prime Focus London helped develop three of the mesmerisingly abstract spots by working closely with director Howard Greenhalgh. The brief for “Football” was to create a 'robotic study in motion'. Using a time-slice technique as a starting point, Flame artist Pete Young manipulated the high-speed images of footballers to create an urban-feeling but hi-tech film. Most of the piece was shot on a Phantom V5 camera at 1000 frames per second. The background footballers were looped to make a rhythmic 'keepy uppy' motion, and the foreground footballers were warped, distorted, blended and streaked in Flame to create the trail effect. All the elements were then composited together with some background cleanup. Pete Young also added a variety of 3d camera moves to fuse the scenes together. “Moon” consists of such beautiful photography that it didn't require a huge amount of post to make it visually stunning. The pieces of the moon were treated by Flame artist, Marcus Wood, to glow and enhance their environment, as if they were real pieces of moonlight. Some shots were constructed from two or three different plates in order to combine the best takes of boats, calm sea and sky. The final moon was made from a super high resolution digital still, with its reflections added onto the water’s surface in a rippling motion. The red lanterns on the boats were also enhanced in Flame to accentuate the BBC's red branding. “Surfer” proved the trickiest because the surfing conditions on the shoot were far from ideal. Despite heroic attempts to film a massive tubing wave at the right angle from a stabilised camera head mounted on a jet-ski, the perfect shot could not captured. So the team had to work with a less-than-perfect shot that required manipulation into a perfect circle. The surfer who was on this wave had to be painted out and replaced with our four hero surfers. These surfers were scanned at HD and stabilised to prevent too much softening, then re-lit, tracked and composited onto the circular wave by Flame artist, Derek Moore. He also tracked and added shadows and warped spray elements to make the surfers look as real as possible. Prime Focus London's CG department were called upon to make a fine spray atmosphere to place between the camera lens and the surfers to help bed them in, and also to create some extra footage outside of the normal frame to allow the shot to be rotated in Flame.

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