DazPix was asked to create the titles and graphics package for the brand new 20-part series for BBC Two.

Melvyn Bragg retells the fascinating stories of life in Britain from 1900 to 1970 through the archive collections of the British Film Institute and other National and Regional Film Archives.

From coal mining via seaside holidays through to the 1977 Silver Jubilee, Melvyn reflects on the past hardships and simple pleasures of British life, as well as the enormous social changes that took place from the 1900s onwards. Travelling across the UK, Melvyn meets members of the public who appeared in the historic films featured in the series, and brings them face-to-face with their relatives with the help of a 1967 custom built vintage mobile cinema.

Melvyn Bragg said: “At the turn of the last century one invention changed the way we recall our history forever – the motion camera. Thanks to Britain’s pioneering film-makers, we can still glimpse a world long gone.”

How it was made - The grass and tree textured globe was built, animated and lit in Cinema 4D where the rotoscoped archive footage carefully made in After Effects was seamlessly looped and incorporated into the scene. Multiple render passes were then brought back into After Effects where the sky backgrounds, additional lighting effects and other animated elements were added. The whole sequence was combined with images of The Mobile Cinema which was shot on DSLR and treated, and end title animated before the final edit to the music score.

Aside from the Title Sequence, DazPix also created a fully 3d animated timeline of the decades, straps, stings, and wipes for the 20 part series.

Designed and Animated by DazPix

Client: BBC Manchester / BBC2

Here are a few images of the banners on location with the Vintage Mobile Cinema

A short looping animation to illustrate how the new printing & packaging for the latest release of Apocalypse Now on DVD / BluRay will look.

Client: Rogue Four / Studio Canal

This commercial for the N-Dubz album ‘Against All Odds’ was designed and Directed by DazPix, while post was carried out at Chrome Digital. The concept, as can be seen from the storyboard frames in the gallery below, was to make full use of scale and the illusions of scale. Using the key end statement of ‘Biggest Album’, everything in this city environment is huge, including the band, who dwarf the skyscrapers they walk past. Editing on Final Cut Pro, the 3d cgi city, helicopter, giant jumbotron screens and other elements were created in Cinema 4D. Compositing was all done with Adobe After Effects, where lighting, brooding skies, sparks and lightning flashes were added. The N-Dubz kids were rotoscoped from other videos and incorporated into the shots, along with video footage that was composited into the huge screens dotted around the metropolis.

Client: AATW / LutiMedia

This film was commissioned by a collaborative organisation consisting of the Saudi Government Transport Ministry and the Mineral Mining companies in the North of the country.
Tasked with producing a film that not only provided an interesting way of relaying information about the proposed project, we also needed to provide a show piece for the opening ceremony in the desert that was attended by the King himself, to officially start the enormous operation involved in this railway project. The railway itself is the biggest engineering feat ever undertaken in the world, phase one is covered in the film, linking the North and South of Saudi Arabia from the mineral rich mountains to Riyadh and the coastal ports.

After weeks of pre production planning, storyboarding and casting, both in London and Riyadh, we split into two filming units for the project. Unit one went on a journey through Saudi, filming landscape, factory, town and building works for all the cut-aways and train plates. Unit two, shot the main visual effects and scripted parts. Starting in a tower block looking over Riyadh’s flat landscape, we created a set for an architects office, before grabbing some more material outside in the Riyadh streets. The next day we moved into the desert for the bulk of the shooting, which was a challenging environment to shoot in, especially with the wind and swirling sand. We still needed to shoot some greenscreen material for the train interior, before getting the flights back to London to begin the edit and post production.
We edited on Avid Media Composer, onlined in Avid DS and created the 3D cgi in Autodesk Maya with Thumbprint Animation. Avid DS composited a majority of the shots, along with Autodesk Discreet Flint. We used Adobe After Effects for the map sequences and some of the demonstration effects.

Client: Saudi Arabian Railways / OR Madarat

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An 3D animated looping logo device for the Arqiva plasma screen displays.

Client: Arqiva / Jabez Productions

This was a pitch for a Title Sequence and graphics package for a Chart Show to be shown on UK Television.

Here was the brief treatment that accompanied the storyboard….
45 second title sequence concept.
The central element to the sequence is the ever moving and changing gold globe.
It consists of seemingly hundreds of randomly extendable columns, each able to quickly extend towards camera to display graphics, information, footage etc.
The camera remains relatively still, with a handheld feel, gently rotating around the environment, while the globe is always jumping and fidgeting about, moving backwards and forwards, extending and retracting it’s cube like tendrils in a wavy organic yet techy motion. It feels alive, playful and amorphous.
The globe pulsates more violently throwing forward a shower of tumbling musical notes that sparkle as they move towards us.
Camera rushes through the notes and into the globe to see a clean, techy and funky environment, numbers, dancers, giant arrows and strange constructing and deconstructing objects.
Rushing back out of the globe, more clips are shown, until a climactic burst of animation heralds the title.

Client: Sprout

The Gospel Message is the words of evangelist Tony Anthony the founding Director of Avanti Ministries.

An 11 minute epic of an animated film, it was created using Adobe Illustrator, Photoshop and After Effects. The project took almost a year to complete from the first script stage to the final delivery. We began with the script and edited it until it was tight enough to be digestible in animated form. Then we recorded the voice over with David McAlister, before beginning the enormous task of bringing all of Tony Anthony’s words to life and making the message a visually interesting journey. The final animation was then taken to Jabez Production where Ian Oakley created the sound design and made the final edits.

Client: Avanti / Jabez Production

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A 30 and 15 second ident designed for 3D night when the Disney Channel showed the Hannah Montana Best of Both Worlds concert in anaglyph 3D, as well as Spy Kids 3 and Toy Story.
Please see the storyboard frames below.

Client: Disney Channel / Duke

This film was commissioned by Jack Morton to kick off the global launch show in Berlin of the BMW 7 series executive car. Due to the secrecy surrounding the final look of the car which wasn’t to be revealed before the launch show, we needed to somehow showcase the car without actually seeing it by disguising it’s body shape with the constantly changing amorphous liquid metal. This cinema-quality promotional film was shot on locations around the world including San Francisco, Monument Valley and Berlin. The launch event was an amazing night of glitz, film, food and entertainment, and of course the entrance of the new car. The event was held in the hangar featured in the film, which was built to contain Airships, but is now converted into a tropical paradise with swimming pool, water slides and man made beach for the German public to enjoy.
The powerful musical theme intergrates modern elements with styles from the five continents, such was the success of the score, that BMW arranged live performances at subsequent events.
The film was shot on 35mm film, and transferred and graded at vtr on the Ursa Gold telecine, before entering the lengthy visual effects faze where the 3d cgi car was built and composited, as well as the numerous other visual effects shots featured during the film. Every technique was used, motion control, HDRI maps, morphing, keying and compositing. All Visual Effects were handled and shoot supervised by DazPix. The film was a winner at the IVCA communication awards.

Client: BMW / Jack Morton Worldwide

The second commercial in the British Gas campaign features Jake in the bath receiving a phone call from his Mum. She is in the Antarctic checking in to see that her sons new found fame isn’t corrupting him, when he tells her about the new deal from British Gas.
As before the copy writing and storyboard stage was finalised first with the agency creatives, before work began on creating the new character design that was needed for Jake’s Mum and the other penguins that feature in the commercial. The shoot for this one was a much more contained set which was dressed beautifully, as a film star like Jake would expect. There are some nice details in the production design, including a penguin shaped Oscar, Jake’s personalised towels, and the blue fish bath toys who pop up to make an appearance. As well as requiring multiple passes of each shot that contained foreground elements, we used a motion control camera rig so that every pass would line up correctly at the compositing stage as well as ensuring the shots were really smooth camera moves. A good example of the use of motion control on this project was the shot of the bathroom, where Jake can just be seen behind the glass splash back and plant. With this shot we needed 5 separate passes that all matched exactly, a clean bathroom with no bath, a clean bathroom with bath, a steam pass, a glass splash back pass, and the plant by itself against bluescreen. Once the shoot had wrapped, the 35mm rushes were transferred and graded by a C-Reality telecine suite, before the edit was made and the shots supplied for the 3d computer generated animation stage. The live action set shots were tracked in Maya live and boujou, and that tracking data was used by Maya to place the penguin model and animation into the scene where Jake’s facial expressions, flipper movements and beak action could be tweaked and adjusted to match the voiceover that had been recorded and edited previously. The Antarctica scenes with Jake’s Mum were made entirely in Maya, aside from some photographic reference and texture material for the backgrounds. The animation, texturing, lighting and rendering stage took several weeks before the whole commercial was brought to life in the Autodesk Discreet Flame compositing suite. Jake was integrated fully into the scenes with all his layers, highlight and shadow passes, mattes, separate eyes and more. Steam was added, bubbles and foam were animated in, reflections and shadows created, phone screens tracked in, foreground elements composited back over the action, subtle warping of the bath foam, phone call split screen effects, snowflakes and refracted through glass warp effects. The straplines and legal text was added and the final audio mix completed the project before final delivery and the commercial went to air.

Client: EHSRealtime / British Gas

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