BBC Ood

Here's something new that I have made. It's a variation on a theme of other stuff I have made, but after watching Planet of the Ood a couple of weeks back, this was a sequence which leapt out as needing this treatment:




UPDATE
If you can't see the embeded video above, then try this direct link to YouTube.

As an aside - YouTube really make it difficult to add widescreen content. Sort it out YouTube!

Bong!

ITV1 did one the only sensible things they have done in a long time and resurrected News At Ten. It's the first time since 1999 that the bongs have been heard. Of course I'm approaching it from my geeky title-sequence and branding way so I have to say I'm impressed. The whooshing from space is back, the iconic music is back and in full.

Compare and contrast this from 1988:



with this from 2008:



Update:
To see a short clip on how ITN and MPC put the new title sequence together click here

All very much deja vu, but in a good way. It brings home just how much the London skyline has changes in just 20 years too.

It's just a shame that ITN still seems to be a shadow of its former self. The bulletin had an obvious effort put into it but ITN has dumbed down so much in the last 5 years or so that they have a large hill to re-climb.

Rebranding

If I were charged with rebranding a TV channel and particularly with rebranding UKTV:G2 this isn't necessarily what I would have come up with!

Fame part two, on TWO

In the continuing story of the spread of my spoof BBC ONE ident, one of my You Tube watchers has just pointed out that the BBC TWO website are linking to it now.

It's here - at the bottom of the page under 2-turn.
At least for now.

Yay!

Brand Watch

Today BBC News updated their title graphics and music. It's all very similar to what they had before, and I'm sure that the only people to notice or care will be title branding geeks like me.

I like it. The new title sequence, across all the news bulletins, does seem to start with a rather disturbing nuclear accident in Turkey, but it does keep the theme of the last few years. So they keep their wooshing stream of "BBC NEWS" - an image with a sort of continuity going back to the rather more sedate graphic revolving around the top of the Alexandra Palace transmitter in the 1950s.

Finally, they have seen sense and dropped the ridiculous two-word headline from the on-the-hour title sequence for News 24. It was tortuous seeng them try and reduce the headline to ten or 12 characters - invariably IRAQ BOMBS. Worse even than the old extremes of CEEFAX editors needing to fill the entire headline-row in teletext news stories.

News 24 have also decided, at long last, that they are actually offering a widescreen service. They have positioned their on-screen clock in a discrete position tucked right into the bottom-left corner. Before now they insisted in having it in the form of a large box set annoyingly far over from the bottom left corner. There, it always looked incredibly odd unless you happened to be watching a feed cropped to fit a 4:3 near-square style television where it actually would be in the corner. As it was it looked like someone had stuck a red post-it to the screen. That's all well and good until you realise that News 24 was a digital-only channel offered only in widescreen format. So why bother?

Elsewhere on the Electric InterWeb

Busy busy - my new job (same company different role) is eating much of my blogging time at the moment. I'm hoping it will stabilise soon.
In the meantime I've had a little time to look at where else "Nimbos" is used. Apart from being, as far as I can tell, a Spanish word for cloud, I am also a smart-home company.
Well fancy that.

Washing Themes

Time for blowing my own trumpet again. I blogged last week that the BBC were updating their BBC1 continuity idents, and how pleased I was that the dancers were being dropped. Well I spent part of this last weekend doing my own version. There's a small flash version to see here. I'm quite pleased with the way this turned out, although the fact I haven't managed to YouTube it in widescreen rather than 4:3 is annoying.

Identities

Finally!

The BBC have decided to drop the god-awful "dancing" continuity idents for BBC One. These always were a patronising and parochial idea of what inclusiveness should be. It was also a real shame to see any kind of globe dropped after so many years.

The new set are all based around the theme of a circle, which is the closest we were going to get to a return of the globe, I suppose. I really like them. There is a good mix of real-life filming and CGI components so making the best use of current technology while not being a slave to it. They have also dropped the annoying post-it note style blocks for the channel name. This was not a bad idea in and of itself, but after carefully explaining that the way forward during the transition from 4:3 to widescreen televisions in people's homes was for a centered name (as they had during the balloon's tenure) they dropped it for a not-quite right justified name and blew that very good idea out of the water. So I'm also glad that they've returned to a centered logo.

I just hope they haven't squandered the chance to create these in high definition. It would be embarrassing if they had to start all-over again. There are also numerous opportunities for spoofing the idea. I have one or two already...

Death by a thousand cuts

In the continuing saga of the gradual demise of ITV it was announced yesterday that its chief exec, Charles Allen, was to resign. It had been pre-empted for quite a while though, so hardly a shock.

I would say that ITV had gone into a terminal decline as soon as Thames lost its franchise years ago, but that was just one low point in the fairly roller-coasteresque fortunes of commercial TV. I think the rot really set in with the ITV Digital fiasco and the merger to one single company. The regional identities were lost forever in favour of an amorphous, souless behemoth.

Over the last few years as ITV passed its 50th birthday, we've had announcements of big losses - the failure and closure of the dedicated news channel, the loss of any kind of childrens' programming production, the scaling down of drama, the dropping of documentary production...

In their place we've had the ramping-up of of soap to the extent that now there's five and a half hours each week just in primetime ITV1 - around a fifth of airtime (taking primetime as between 7 and 10pm, compare to BBC1 with 2 hours-worth a week). The rest seems to be filled with re-runs, reality shows, clips shows or insipid dramas containing a very small selection of golden-handcuff "slebs" like Sarah Lancashire, Robson Green or Ross Kemp.

The strategy for their attempted viewer-grab viewers is to analyse what was cheap and popular in the nineties and turn it up to eleven. New viewers are passing over ITV1 while they try to bolster numbers by double-counting their soap figures with ever increasing numbers of episodes. This is far more than a symptom of a digitally fragmented audience. Even the Bill, which I used to enjoy, is more soap than drama and the once indestructible ITN is a shadow of its former self.

When Mr S and I stood on the embankment and watched the fireworks for the 50th birthday go off over the former LWT Tower (although we were there more for the Mayor's Thames Festival) I remember remarking that it was more of a wake than a celebration.

Whoever replaces Mr Allen has their work cut out for them.

Brotherliness

Anyone who knows me personally will probably be aware that I don't hold a very high opinion of Big Brother. It's a perennial rant, I suppose, but I refuse to believe it's simply down to a sense of cultural snobbery. I was always a bit dubious of the "social experiment" tag even back at the beginning, although I see how that could be argued at least back then.

I tend to watch the first episode of each season as there is a kind of fascination with the characters recruited. After the first year, just by the nature of the format, I always imagined that they must be increasingly scraping the barrel but now I think they've broken through the bottom and have started digging.

I don't necessarily blame the housemates themselves. I'm sure for some people there is a genuine attraction and belief that the experience could be life-changing in a positive way. However, C4 and Endemol now seem to be simply in the business of caging the people lured by their honey-trap and poking them with sticks on national TV. I also have a feeling that as the chase for ratings goes on against this year's football World Cup that it will increasingly move from poking to beating.

It's not big or clever and I'm sure this year will attract a raft of complaints just like the last few have. Here's hoping somebody there wakes up and takes notice. I also think it's telling that many other countries, including The Netherlands (from where the format comes) quickly abandoned it after a year or two.

Resurrection Man

Christopher Eccleston made such a good job of relaunching <DOCTOR.WHO>, and not to mention playing Christ, that I suppose it's only natural that he'd be seen as a shoe-in for another resurrection - The Prisoner. I could be unkind and say this means he's type-cast.

So what's the betting that Eccles will take on yet another relaunch of an old 60s/70s favourite before the decade is out? Worzel Gummidge, perhaps? He'd have his serious head on, of course...

Toys

If there's anything that can reduce me to a five-year-old it's this kind of thing. Why weren't they around when I was five?

Far too much fun to leave in the box. Some more here.

US-ovision

I see from Digital Spy that NBC is considering setting up a song contest between the various States in the style of the Eurovision Song Contest. Just as the European competition seems to foster block-votes and old-score-settling I can see the enmity now: there will be the old north vs. south, red states vs. blue states, coastal states vs. interior states. The list is endless. It’ll be just like the Eurovision, only with the added dimension of guns. I do hope it’s shown over here too.

Shinier TV

I’m just back from spending a few days with the folks in honour of it being my birthday a couple of days back. Don’t worry – we managed to do the traditional drinking-like-a-fish the previous weekend, and royally so.

Presents included a shiny new DVD player – decadent, perhaps, but it does have one distinct advantage over the current model and that’s DivX playback capability. Yes DVD is “God’s own format”TM but the ability to cram 10 hours of crisp and shiny TV onto a single disk is heaven to a TV-head like me. So whoa, and indeed, hoo!

There were other televisual highlights over the weekend. Chief of which was the opening to the 20th Olympic Winter Games in Turin. Normally sport of any kind is enough to bring me out in palpitations but there’s something about the Olympics which I find mesmerising. Maybe it’s all the ceremonial, anthems and medals which appeals. Congratulations should go to the City of Turin for a mainly spectacular opening ceremony. All the usual bells and whistles were there as well as some very imaginative tableaux. As usual there were the more offbeat segments. In the same way Athens had the pregnant woman with light-up belly, here we had the futuristic ballet dancers followed by the “army of the future”. I have no idea what they were supposed to represent beyond those vague titles. I have suspicions that these parts of the segments are what happens when you promise a place in the ceremony to a particular group before working out how they will fit in. On this occasion it was the ballet and the judo groups. Still we now have a fortnight of watching people throw themselves off hills, and sliding rocks so that can’t be bad.