GOLDEN SQUARE COMPLETE BBC IDENTS

Golden Square Visual Effects House produces idents for the BBC’s new high profile series ‘The Blue Planet’
The trails were written by Ella Littlewood and produced by Clare Charlton, the Creative Director was Ruth Shabi. The trails and ident were directed by Sean de Sparengo and produced at Golden Square.
Golden Square’s Inferno artist Harry Jarmen, created the Blue Planet ident, used at the front of each episode, by compositing together the BBC balloon, existing footage of sharks and various 2-D textures.
The striking trail for the series was created by Golden Square’s latest arrival, inferno artist, Marc Jouveneau. It shows the seamless journey across the surface of the moon, through the earth’s atmosphere and into the ocean. It opens with 10 seconds of CG which the director Sean de Sparengo wanted to look very realistic. With this in mind, Jouveneau used NASA images downloaded from their website as the basis of the texture maps for both the moon and the earth. Digitalia provided Golden Square with fully composited and separate CG elements, which Jouveneau re-composited for a more realistic appearance. The camera move through space was directed by de Sparengo,
For the transition between the CG and the live action, a cloud element was used, and a live action shot along the surface of the sea from the BBC's own material and some live action material shot for this project at 'Action Underwater' studios in Waltham Cross. The DP was Mike Valentine who shot all the underwater sequences in 'The Beach' and all the recent Bond films.
The 30 second live action sequence mimics the view of a fish as it dives down to the ocean floor, encountering as it goes weird and wonderful creatures, and ending with a 'horror moment' before racing back to the surface. Jouveneau effected the transitions between nearly all the shots to make them look as if they were shot together, they were cut from over 500 hours of underwater photography over 5 years, grading the blue sea backdrop to a deeper and deeper hue, until, 1000 metres plus down, it turns to black. The journey back to the surface is built in Inferno entirely from bubble and water elements shot at 'Action Underwater'.
(GB)