[James2001]

I wonder what the 35mm version of the idents were made for, as I don't think I've ever seen any film sourced footage of them before.

[TesTVWhirl]

Was that not one of those things Channel 4 still held a copy of on 35mm in the early years for emergencies, just it was never actually used? Though going off what appears to be written on the film can in the thumbnail there, the particular version that has been scanned (or stuck in front of a phone camera) for that Tony Pritchett YT channel looks like it might have been put together for a showreel or competition at the SIGGRAPH conference in the US in 1983, which may be why it was needed on film there.

[Steve in Pudsey]

Perhaps 35mm was used because it wouldn't require any NTSC-PAL conversion conversion?

[James2001]

One of those articles claims that the ident was actually rendered straight to 35mm by the company in the US, but that can't have been the case, because there'd be film artifacts- grain, dirt, scratches, weave etc. on the idents, which there isn't, it's quite clearly rendered straight to video. The hand coloured versions are clearly on film though, maybe that's where the confusion came in.

I have seen some CGI idents that are clearly sourced from film (the 1985 STV thistle ident for example), and I've seen filmed transfers of some other 80s ITV CG idents, when they were attatched to a programme physically edited on film, but Channel 4's ident wouldn't have needed that.

[IndigoTucker]

I wonder if a UK team initially wrote the code for the animation, but the UK only had the tech to output a wireframe on film to be manually painted in later - seen here - but the results were undesirable - then the code was sent to the states for rendering as coloured blocks on video by Gehring et al?

[Neil Jones]

There was some discussion on TV Forum, here, to which the honourable IndigoTucker contributed:
www.tvforum.co.uk 

Can you tell me more about this ITVident? - TV Forum
TV Forum Light Dark System Default Homepage TV Home The Newsroom Media & Tec…
  Source: www.tvforum.co.uk

While this was a discussion about the ITV schools package, it seems that package was at least rendered in the same way as the Channel 4 blocks (if you look further up the thread) - and Schools was farmed out to somewhere in America for rendering (Gehring?) and I wouldn't be surprised if they did both packages.

[James2001]

The old tvschools website had a feature on the making of the ITV Schools ident, and I'm pretty sure it was rendered in the UK. Things would have come along a long way technology wise in those 5 years since the C4 ident was made.

[IndigoTucker]

Yeh I think by 87 the UK had dedicated CG equipment to render in-house using dedicated software packages on dedicated hardware. Back in 82, the animations had to be coded manually (ie mathematically calculate and plot the movement of points around in 3d space) - and run on general-purpose supercomputers.

[lookoutwales]

A Sunday start-up and some IVC from TV-am - from this week in 1985. Almost feels like they're having a go at being a 'region', you could say.

Even Kay Burley ended up doing some of these pre-Frost continuity shifts.

www.youtube.com 

[Stooky Bill]

In vision continuity like that happened a lot during their strike of course.

Note in that clip that the first programme named on the caption before they came on air is different to the one on the programme line up. Presumably it had a different name on the run up to Christmas and they didn't change it.

Nice to see both of TVam's sets on display - the bricks and the cyclorama.