“No, Homer, very few cartoons go out live, it’s a terrible strain on the animator’s wrist.”
broadcast
The Ocean Wants You Today
Last night was the BBC2 premier of the first episode of Atlantic. At BDH we had the honour of providing some graphics for this fantastic eye feast. Now available on the iPlayer I’m sure.
20 years of BDH
Join the Royal Television Society for a rare opportunity to ask local heroes BDH, one of the most awarded digital creative teams in the UK, to reveal their secrets in this special panel discussion.
Yes, there are a few more tickets left for a twentieth anniversary “In Conversation” evening with my employers, Steve, John and Rob (The B, the D and the H, in that order) to be held tomorrow evening at 6pm at the Watershed. Lynn Barlow, Chair of the Royal Television Society in Bristol will be interviewing them and taking us through the highlights of their work over the years. Bookings can be made through the Watershed website.
Dino Death Match
National Geographic have uploaded an image gallery from one of the dinosaur shows we worked on. Some of the compositions on the stills they have chosen are a bit unusual, and they seem to have upload everything twice, but they still look marvellous to me.
Prizes, Prizes.
This week we received the official nomination certificates for the BAFTA for Digital Creativity.
This was for the War of Words VR app that was made by the team at BDH from the some of the animations we made for the War Of Words: Soldier Poets of the Somme documentary I have talked about extensively here.
As far as I know the App is still available on iTunes and the Play store.
This also reminds me that we picked up two West of England RTS awards recently (during my “blog break”). One for Best Graphics for War of Words and the other for Best Short Animation for The Somme In Seven Poems. It was quite an evening as I wasn’t really sure we’d win anything, let alone two, and beating such greats as Arthur Cox and Aardman Animations.
So I had to do two speeches, which was interesting for everyone I think. Hopefully I kept it short and mumbly, because I actually remember nothing about being on stage except a sea of expectant faces and the overwhelming urge to run.
Here’s some pictures of us collecting and yes that’s me at the mic:
Quite an evening. Felt very lucky and blessed that what we worked so hard on was recognised in such a way.
That’s the end of the trumpets.
In other news I have fired up the old Facebook page to stream sketches and the like, because, even though I am a grown up I still have a problem zapping art in front of people who have friended me there, so it’s a separate place for that. Please follow along if you like Facebook.
I’m also trying to restart the daily sketching project, now the dust has settled, but it’s less “daily” more “regular”, I’m still keeping the 365 count as I would like to have some closure on that. They go on Instagram then get sent everywhere else. So probably best not follow me in more than one place because you’ll get repeats and no-one deserves that.
Until next time.
War of Words: Soldier Poets of the Somme – Broadcast Scrapbook
I wanted to write some stuff about this programme sooner, but the events previously documented in this blog (which all began on the afternoon of broadcast) meant it’s taken me some time to take stock and collect all the things that happened as a result of the show going out.
As I have mentioned before, “War of Words: The Soldier Poets of the Somme” was a 90 minute BBC Arts documentary, directed by Sebastian Barfield that sought to reconnect the history and the landscape of the notorious 1916 Battle of the Somme with the extraordinary poetry and literature that it inspired. At BDH we created content graphics to help illustrate the history and also animations (which I was involved with) to accompany the poetry. We had a great team on the job, and working on it was a moving and wonderful experience.
This post is partly a scrapbook for my purposes to collect some of the information, posts and reactions that went out on social media, in a Storify style, so I might be updating it as and when I come across more of them. Also be warned, this post is mostly embeds from Twitter, so if you are reading this on anything else that the actual webpage they might format weirdly.
You can see a clip from the show via the BBC here, this part concerns the removal of lice eggs from clothing and Isaac Rosenberg’s Louse Hunting.
There was a preview screening of the programme at the Watershed on the 5th November. Afterwards Peter Barton, Jean Moorcroft Wilson, Sebastian Barfield, Jeremy Banning and Richard Van Emden discussed the programme, the poets and how they shaped the way people remember the Great War. That discussion is available to hear on Soundcloud here:(direct link).
Sebastien Barfield wrote some words on the BBC blog about the show.
This is a link to a discussion of the programme on Military History Online, quite fascinating in itself.
“The Somme In Seven Poems” was a short that BDH produced which anthologised just the poetry animations themselves. That went onto the iPlayer a week before the broadcast, and got some lovely responses from people, especially on Remembrance Day.
Here is a trailer BDH produced for the short.
Obviously in the modern age, people can watch the show at anytime once it goes on the iPlayer so these tweets are not really in chronological order. I just went through the hashtags and search options retrospectively and grabbed some of the most interesting ones.
https://twitter.com/FWWMiscellany/status/533763935141638145 https://twitter.com/ArcanePub/status/535732918468235264The whole programme has been taken down from the iPlayer now but I have heard bits are on YouTube somewhere, you’ll have to search for that yourself, if you feel so inclined.
BDH have produce a VR app that contains the animation for The Kiss one of the poems featured on the show. This works on Google Cardboard and is available on Google Play and iTunes.
You’ve got until Monday 12pm to catch “The Somme in Seven Poems” (12 mins), and 10 days from today to catch the full length documentary “War of Words: Soldier Poets of the Somme”.
I’ll write a more comprehensive post about this project and how it went down at a later date, but due to recent events this is about as much as I can manage at the moment.
Take care.
Human Universe
At BDH I was recently a small part of the awesomeness that was the CGI and graphics team on The new Professor Brian Cox series Human Universe.
It begins, with the first episode “Apeman-Spaceman” this evening (Tuesday 7th October) on BBC TWO.
We previously worked on the Wonders of the Universe and Wonders of Life with the same team.
Paul Greer 