This is great to see - so much inventiveness went into the BBC station idents through the 90s, which was part of a bigger creative surge across all UK and European broadcasters in that period. The budgets were pretty decent, but the results on screen went way beyond that as the work was seen as being very prestigious and the teams involved would compete to see who could go one better than the last ident on screen, putting in a lot of extra work outside of the budget. As the BBC didn't have much in the way of a graphic production unit by this stage a lot of this work was outsourced to places such as Cell, Cal, The Bureau, Rushes, Artem, and the Moving Picture Company (only Artem and MPC remain today from all of those outfits). I made the "flying teapot/pocket watch" animation at 2:10 - inspired by the Mad Hatter's tea party from Alice in Wonderland - everything was modelled, textured, shaded, lit, and animated in Alias Power Animator running on a Silicon Graphics Indigo II Extreme over a period of (I think) three weeks. The hardest part was the little stream of tea that comes out of the pot as Power Animator didn't have any decent fluid sims or even iso surfaces in those days - I remember making a lot of little spheres and then squashing them together through deformer lattices to make it look a bit liquidy! The "aurora" ident just before it was made by my colleague who later went on to be a very senior animator at Pixar on Wall-E. We worked silly hours to make these things as good as they possibly be - lovely to see them all collected here!
@@guksack Thank you! I've forgotten the names of the BBC designers who I worked with on this ident, but they were very good. The BBC had a small in-house design team, but little or nothing in the way of facilities to get the work done - you have to remember that a decent CG workstation back then cost as much as a really good Lamborghini, so it was understandable that the Beeb didn't want to own that stuff (you could do it all in Blender with an off-the-shelf PC from Argos today). The designers were very smart - they knew that we couldn't achieve what they were after if we stuck to the bid days, so they engaged us as partners, getting us creatively involved which meant we were invested in the process and wanted it to turn out as good as it could be. Or to put it another way, we'd work all hours until it was done! It was exciting stuff to work on so we were happy to do it - the alternative was another Daily Mail advert, or worse. The ads paid better, but this was cooler. We were only working at standard digital PAL res - 720x576 - so nothing like the UHD images we do today as standard. I think I did the teapot ident without any kind of compositing at all - eventually rendered it all in one pass straight out of Power Animator. I may have run it through something to add pseudo film grain, to take the edge off the image. There's a slight "click" in the animation of the watch as it comes into final alignment with the BBC "One" - I remember I had some kind of problem with the keyframes that took a while to sort out, never entirely fixed it. Whilst we were using exclusively CG for the idents we did at MPC, a lot of the other stuff in this compilation makes use of superb physical models, motion-control photography, stop motion, physical special effects, hand-drawn animation and much more. The mid 90s were a fascinating transition point in animation and visual effects.
I *do* wish they would go back to things like these. The 90s idents just seemed like a huge period of new ideas/creativity. Maybe Channel 4's creativity with their 80s idents had a great influence! (but they never did 2 second stings like these.)
Funny how the 1 never caught on as well as its 2 counterpart. Looking at these, there's some pretty amazing creativity. Now, this is controversial, but I'm thinking that maybe the globe shouldn't have carried over into this era, and these stings be the idents instead? The 90's globe was fantastic, but perhaps it was the reason why the 1 logo didn't catch on? See, I'm of the opinion that BBC One should never have dropped the globe concept. So that goes against that thought. But if they'd have dropped it in favour of this 1 package, I'd have approved. It's ridiculous how much better these stings would have been as idents, than the dreadful Oneness.
I think the main problem was that BBC One had only 1 full running ident. The best choice would have been to keep the globe ident but add more to it like new idents and/or a new concept to the globe and something that was desperately needed, an accompanying soundtrack.
I had a video with both jelly and boat sail (and not only it) but somehow I got copyright strike for it. Sure, I can re-upload the video but I afraid that BBC will going apeshit on me.
People STILL watching this video? 50k views is something. I mean, I'm not bragging that I have amount of views, just didn't expected I would have such numbers. Edit: 100.000 views, you gotta be kidding me...
The budgets were quite modest, but everyone wanted to work on this kind of work so we would often go above and beyond to make them as good as possible -if the BBC had money for say ten days with the CG animation team we would generally work way into the evenings and over the weekend to turn that into 15 or 20 days :-) The different CG animation companies in London would really compete to get this work.
@@paulfranklin7161 Thanks for the insight! My dad worked on some idents for HTV (Bristol) but budgets and enthusiasm were similar to 2024 standards, haha! These are all wonderful though, you can see the effort.
@@guksack I loved doing idents for the broadcasters - I was lucky enough to do BBC1, Channel 4, RTE One and Two (Ireland), as well as various ITV regions (LWT, Central etc). I even did five idents in a day for an Icelandic station 🙂 Great way to learn to think on your feet - very useful training for when I moved into movies a few years later.
