[Newsroom]

One of the wonderful things about the Balloon was that it was, originally, designed for exactly this thing. During the initial design phase, one of the ideas was that the balloon would be used at major sporting events etc to fly over, creating a link between the design element and actual events (bringing the brand to life, long before that was the 'phrase du jour'.

Indeed, Martin Lambie-Nairn once spoke about it as you can see on my blog: vmphilblog.wordpress.com 

Thanks so much for posting this! Super interesting watch!

[Stuart]

Indeed, Martin Lambie-Nairn once spoke about it as you can see on my blog: vmphilblog.wordpress.com 

Thanks for posting. I have seen the video before, but it's always fascinating to watch as MLN was such a talented guy and he explained the design thought processes very well.

[Clean Feed]

This evening's edition of Points West reported on the rediscovery of the BBC One balloon:

www.youtube.com 

[JamieD]

Yes, it seems I overinterpreted the original Facebook posts and got a bit overexcited in my original post – in that they haven't actually inflated the balloon yet to see what condition it is in!

It seems they are inflating it this weekend in a field to see what's what.

I guess time will tell to see if it will just be tethered at events or make it back up into the air for proper flights. Fingers crossed!

[rick]

Oh dear... that doesn't look right... and this was an ident?

[VMPhil]

It's a regional ident so I'm not surprised it doesn't look quite right

[Tola]

BBC News report on the balloon coming back:
www.bbc.co.uk 

Famous BBC One balloon to take to the air again - BBC News
The balloon is due to be inflated for the first time in decades after being kept…
  Source: www.bbc.co.uk

This also includes information on its origins, which I don't think have been documented before, at least to my knowledge.

[Worzel]

There's a bit of a discrepancy here...

'Mark Lockwood was the creative director at Virgin Airship and Balloon Company and flew the balloon at different places across the UK to film the idents for four months in 1997.

A lot of people thought it was computer generated, but it wasn't.

Every shot was absolutely taken on location and the agency selected the shots they wanted', he said.

I seem to recall in one of Martin Lambie-Nairn's talks he said for a few of the idents, they did computer generate the balloon (the live action ones such as the football players) as they couldn't get it to fly in the right direction.

[VMPhil]

The initial launch idents and stings were real, it was the later additions, the “lifestyle” idents that featured people, that had a CG balloon.

[Mike]

Oh dear... that doesn't look right... and this was an ident?

This doesn’t look original - it’s 16:9 for a start and Bristol wasn’t at the time, and the other archival footage shown wasn’t that bad, maybe it was a hastily thrown together mock.