28-06-2024, 06:12 PM
(28-06-2024, 02:32 PM)James2001 Wrote: With the old ITN coverage, it's a shame they weren't able to have the big sprawling sets like the BBC did, with them only having access to comparably small studios, originally in Television House, then Wells Street when the BBC had big studios at Lime Grove and TVC. 64 and 66 look like it was just a camera and desk set up in the newsroom. It was only when they used the atrium at Gray's Inn Road they really had something on a BBC-esque scale, and with the VR/chromakey studios of the last 20 years they've made the studios look bigger than they were.
I guess ITN could theoretically have hired out a bigger studio from one of the ITV companies, but I don't know how logistically easy that would have been.
You can see the fish eye lens on the Feb 74 titles in that vid, and they did it in 83 as well, which made the studio look a lot bigger tha it was.
Just to give some perspective - when ITN were based in Wells Street (1969 to 1991) - they only had one main studio, which was 2,000 Sq Ft in space with a smaller 700 Sq Ft studio - so they literally had to cram as much into such a small space - wide angle lenses and a carefully constructed set ensured ITN's election nights from Wells Street were decent, but could never match the near 11,000 Sq Ft size of Studio TC1 at BBC Television Centre, or even the other four medium sized studios which were 8,000 Sq Ft each in floor space.
In 1991 when ITN moved into Grays Inn, they then had two slightly larger main studios in the basement, both are the same size, around 2,500 Sq Ft floor space each, so only slightly bigger than their main Wells Street studio - this is the reason why for 1997 and 2001 they used the vast atrium of Grays Inn for their election studio, and even in 2005, with VR backdrop to the set was the atrium.