The Hive completes ITV News promotion

Soho effects and animation studio The Hive has created a high-profile promotion for ITV, showing the exceptional heritage of the station’s news service over the last 50 years, and which also informs viewer of the permanent change of ITV’s Late Evening News programme to 10:30pm.
The 30-second clip, directed by Gareth Randall and designed by Mark Gouldie at ITV Network Promotions, opens with four images of famous ITV newsreaders of the past – Chris Chataway, Reginald Bosanquet, Trevor MacDonald and Alastair Burnett. It then tours through momentous historical events covered on ITV News using mosaic effects of archive news clips which eventually reveal the face of Sir Trevor MacDonald, before ultimately revealing the four current faces of ITV News – Mary Nightingale, Nick Owen, Sir Trevor and Mark Austin.
The challenge for The Hive lay in representing 1,250 individual news clips on screen for the historical section of the clip, and also in creating the mosaic effect from 1,600 separate news clips that reveals, via a pull out, Sir Trevor.
Working under the supervision of The Hive’s creative director Phil Hurrell, animator Jean-Louis Billard, solved the task of applying the 2,850 clips on screen by writing scripts in Softimage XSI that automated the process, while still allowing control over the footage on individual screens.
Billard also wrote scripted operators to allow global control over the animation of the 2,850 screens. Including individual hero clips and extra data elements, he produced all the elements in just 10 days.
The project then went into The Hive’s flame compositing and effects suite, where Peter Smith assembled all of the elements, combining the CG material with live action spot effects.
(GB)