Concept and creative process
Titles for a documentary series on Africa, as seen from an African perspective. Written and presented by Ali Mazrui. The concept behind 'The Africans' titles was of coloured sand representations of the diversity of the continent as presented by Ali Mazrui. Howard Moses remembers well the making of the sequence:
“10 different images were selected from the programmes, and I rotoscoped each one in outline onto a BBC canteen tray, which was the perfect format at the time for the 4 x 3 transmission. The graphics team then coloured up kilos and kilos of table salt with different tones of Buntlac spray paint. The floor of the graphic studio was covered in cardboard squares with large piles of different coloured tones for us to use in the artwork. I pegged up the trays top and bottom and we transported them and the salt down to Geoff Axtells, the rostrum camera facility in Central London, where the cameraman Stephen Williams had set us up a little side room to prepare the artwork.
It took 3 of us, Trevor Marchant, Laurie Russell and myself, a week to construct the images by gently sprinkling and tapping different tones of the salt on to the trays to build the pictures up, including the end shot of the title itself. We had to do it there as obviously we couldn't transport the artwork very far. When we were ready, we carefully carried the trays to the rostrum bench under the camera and then frame by frame shot the sand and salt abstracting into a pointillist image by doing a gradually reticulated tap across the trays.
We had previously done a few tests with the brand-new BBC video rostrum camera facility run by Pete Willis but the final edit was done back at the BBC by Nick Hutchins, a graphics editor who arranged the optical dissolves between our footage and the live action sequences. The music was composed by the BBC electronic workshop. I had wanted the title to be only sand imagery as during the rostrum tests the mix between the moving sand created some beautiful abstractions, as one picture disappeared and the next one appeared, however the producers wanted to add live-action footage.”
More Information
The Africans image 1
The concept behind the title sequence for ‘The Africans’ was to use coloured sand to represent the diversity of the Continent. Selected live action images from the programme were traced and placed on trays on which the images were rendered in coloured sand particles to match the original film colours. The sand images were re-filmed on a rostrum camera to create beautiful motion graphics transitions from one scene to the next.
The concept behind the title sequence for ‘The Africans’ was to use coloured sand to represent the diversity of the Continent. Selected live action images from the programme were traced and placed on trays on which the images were rendered in coloured sand particles to match the original film colours. The sand images were re-filmed on a rostrum camera to create beautiful motion graphics transitions from one scene to the next.