Concept and creative process
The titles for ‘BBC News 24’ were designed by Bill Calder and Rob Shergold and animated by Jo McDonald, with coding by Steve Hart and Sean Kirwan. The logo animation was known internally at BBC News as the ‘news ear‘ as it was designed to represent an aerial view of BBC Television Centre. The ‘BBC News 24’ titles were allegedly the world’s first ever live-rendered titles. Unlike a normal title sequence, which is played-in from a pre-recorded digital master, none of the elements of the News 24 titles existed in a pre-rendered format and the whole sequence was rendered live to air at the top of the hour, using an in-house system called TOG. This was a software program that had been developed from the graphics system used for BBC election night coverage. TOG ran a powerful desktop computer with a state-of-the-art graphics card and It generated graphics live to air, with nothing pre-rendered.
Initially TOG was only intended to render out lower-third text captions with the facility to animate seamlessly, for example, from a superimposed name caption to a headline strap, to breaking news or sports results in any required combination. Additionally, it could change the text height or colour, all within a pre-determined set of rules, but without any of the elements ever existing as pre-rendered artwork.
However Rob Shergold realised that during the start of each hour on News 24, TOG would be sitting idle, so he suggested using it as a way to create the titles also. This gave the production team the ability to change certain elements every hour, depending on what was happening in the news, and continue to make changes right up to the point of transmission. During the pilots and the early days of the transmission of the title sequence, there was a lot of reassurance and hand-holding between graphics and the production gallery. But confidence in TOG to deliver the titles grew quickly, and the production team came to love the ability to change the text and animate the titles live to air, every hour on the hour.