Dublin post facility get Curious

AA Holiday Roadwatch, an Irish televised traffic and travel bulletin broadcast every week for a 10-week period by Ireland’s national broadcast station RTÉ, is produced for the Automobile Association by High Wire, one of the country’s leading post-production companies.
Dublin-based High Wire create television programmes, commercials, music videos and corporate programming for a wide variety of clients including Frontier Films, Louis Marcus Productions, Mint Productions and Rumble Films. The company provides key services such as on and off-line editing, subtitling, graphics and effects.
The facility has been producing AA Holiday Roadwatch for the past five years, but this year – thanks to Curious Software – it was able to introduce real innovation to the bulletins by incorporating animated maps.
Mark Quinn, High Wire’s managing director, said: “AA Holiday Roadwatch takes the format of a TV weather forecast, with maps changing and animating every five or six seconds in line with the presenter’s script. The presenter is shot blue-screen at eight in the morning and from there it’s straight to editing to meet a deadline of 4pm delivery to RTÉ for transmission at 6.30pm.
“For the past five years, we have produced these bulletins using static map templates, which were created in graphics with text overlays inserted during editing. However, this year the AA was looking for a total revamp of the bulletins, so we started by looking at ways in which we could use broadcast-standard animated maps.
“I contacted Curious Software to see if I could take a closer look and they couldn’t have been more helpful.
“We discovered that we could stylise our traffic bulletin maps so that they looked and felt like the AA’s own road map, 'Atlas'. This worked a treat and the AA were delighted.”
(GB)