MTV P.O.V

With powdery solder burns vignetting the schematics, Blac Ionica’s opening for MTV’s “P.O.V.” animates the engineering behind the build to a tight beat with an air of retro espionage that keeps the pace.

Chris Strong, Creative Director at Blac Ionica, details the creation of these sequences for us.

Chris Strong: The program was about Point Of Views. The basic premise of the programme would be for the audience to watch the whole show through the eyes of an undisclosed celebrity.

It started off having a few more colours involved in it and a diagram of a human figure (representing the celebrity aspect) with all these parts bolting onto the body (see early designs doc). But after a discussion with all involved it was felt that it needed to be muted down a bit colour wise, and that overall the Titles should probably concentrate on actual camera parts and equipment more than a person.

The inspiration for the graphic look of the Titles came from 1960′s Russian camera packaging along with film poster artwork from 60′s & 70′s films like the “The Ipcress Files” and “The Conversation”. We also looked at retro TV shows like “Mission Impossible” and combined that sort of energy and atmosphere with the aesthetics of instruction manuals and exploded diagrams.

The piece was designed in Photoshop & Illustrator. The camera parts were modelled and animated in Lightwave, then brought together in After Effects. The sound was developed in Cubase.

The music was directly inspired by Lalo Schifrin from his awesome work on “Mission Impossible” (the TV show) and “Bullit” in particular. Not forgetting Quincy Jones’ classic “Ironside” theme, and a sprinkle of Henry Mancini.

RUSSELL HOWARD’S GOOD NEWS

A Radiohead riff reformatted to a cutout-motion existence where an artful dodger deftly dubsteps his way toward your entertainment. Blac Ionica’s opening for “Russell Howard’s Good News,” sets us right for human folly and a chuckle.

Chris Strong: It initially started off by being a very ambitious live action shoot with Russell that involved projections and giant props that we would’ve made ourselves, however we soon realised that this idea was probably a bit too ambitious and really impractical for the time and the budget given.

Therefore we developed this secondary idea, which was still in the spirit of the original idea, but physically scaled down to a manageable tabletop size. In the end we think that this chosen route actually made for a more unique looking piece of work – and because of the mixture of techniques it has a really interesting quality to it… hopefully increasing it’s longevity. From the outset with this project we’d hoped that it would be the sort of piece of work that people (the audience) would pick up on new bits of detail each time they watched it.

We shot one sequence with Russell in an empty white studio. Designed and printed out other elements (speech bubbles, logo sandwich board, arrows, newspapers etc) along with the selected stills of the shoot with Russell. Mounted it all up onto foam board. Rented some props, some lights and lenses. Made a tabletop white cove with some white formica. Shot it over a non-stop period of 2 days. We then took the rushes into After Effects and tidied them up, tweaked colours and levels. Got a rough cut signed off by the client. Began the lengthly task of retouching and incorporating additional CGI props. Composited it altogether. Gave it all a final grade.

The other thing was that down to lack of space and a limited budget we could only afford to set it all up on a small table, which meant that rather than using a dolly track and a long table, we actually had to animate the pan along. This meant that for every frame everything in the shot had to be moved 1mm by hand to the left. However in the end we feel that this also added to the charm of the piece.