TSI Design create new titles for ‘My Hero’

TSI Design, the design arm of independent broadcast services company TSI, have designed and directed the title and end credit sequences for the fourth series of the hit BBC1 comedy series ‘My Hero’.
The show, a light-hearted romantic comedy about an alien superhero living in Essex, stars Ardal O’Hanlon as the confused superhero, ‘Thermoman’. The new series is planned for later this summer on BBC1.
Designed and directed by Malcolm Dalton, creative director at TSI Design, and produced by Big Bear Films, the key title scenes focus on the protagonist Ardal O’Hanlon as he whizzes through the air Superman style. However as Dalton explains, all is not as it seems: “The person in the majority of the titles sequences is actually a stunt man called Eddie! At one point he is suspended on fine tungsten wires six feet above the floor of the studio. We used a chroma-key to place Thermoman onto the night sky, and a computer-controlled camera to circle around him to mirror the sense of flight. Wind machines and wires created the feeling of speed, causing Thermoman’s cape to flap about for the finished effect.”
TSI’s fire artists, Duncan Balmain and Owen Tyler, added stars, smoke and streaks on the company’s Discreet system to complete the effect.
John Stroud, producer/director of Big Bear Films, said: “We were impressed with TSI and their work on previous My Hero titles. The original, quite challenging brief was that the titles had to appear fairly natural and not too sci-fi based, which is obviously difficult when you have a superhero as the main character! However, TSI have done an excellent job of using the titles to introduce all the characters, and of producing a realistic and natural-looking Thermoman.”
(GB)