Delia Smith's Cookery Course (1978)

Concept and creative process

Delia Smith's classic 1970s series featuring basic, foolproof recipes that saw the home cook find TV fame and fortune. For the titles a simple animation of the outline of a stockpot was used to display shots of tasty ingredients and ultimately as the background for the programme’s title. To create the sequence, the shots of food were photographed in a studio and filmed on a rostrum camera as a continuous sequence, with camera moves and dissolves captured in-camera. The line artwork of the stockpot was also filmed on the rostrum camera with corresponding mattes and the programme titles. All of these elements were combined on an optical printer in the film laboratory and a transmission print of the complete title sequence was produced.