Concept and creative process
Titles for ‘The View from Daniel Pike’, a drama series about the eponymous hard-boiled Glasgow detective played by Roddy McMillan. The title focused on the name ‘PIKE’, derived from the regular typeface ‘Umbra’ but with a modified squared-off ‘P’, turning it into a logotype of the name. In sync with the opening drumbeats, an elongated condensed version of this logo built up from its separate elements, briefly filling the screen depth, before zooming back into infinity to be replaced by the actor’s name, set in the regular ‘Umbra’ font, which panned in from the top and bottom of screen over a high contrast, blue-tinted photo of Pike. A cut to close-up on the photo brought back the regular size ‘PIKE’ logo centre screen, which animated again to become the elongated condensed version of itself. This evolved into a vignette, through which a panning shot of the Glasgow cityscape was visible, while the logo animated back to its regular size. It then mixed and zoomed back to reveal itself to be part of the programme main title over a colour image of Roddy McMillan. A sequence of keyhole vignettes followed to complete the sequence, containing high contrast red and white action images. The titles were filmed on a rostrum camera with mattes of the animating logo to create the final film optical.