[Mike]

Got another weird question. With this title sequence and others of this era. How were the locations chosen? As they seem quite a random allocation of notable places featured in the broadcast region.

tvark.org 

I've always thought it was random, I've never been sure if that design was sent out as a kit of parts (remember the larger regional centres at the time would've had a network graphics department under the Resources/MediaArc umbrella) or if they were produced centrally by L-N...

I personally think they were produced as and when needed by L-N (and suspect the speed at which the rollout happened was to allow for rendering time and design choices), and this was done by L-N, as a lot of regions had places on borders, not in their region, included (Crawley being on South Today's titles, but actually coming under Newsroom South East and then BBC London is one I spotted). 

The reason I say these were centrally produced is some of the stylistic choices, how the orientation of the transmission pulses and locations appear varies according to the shape of the map of the broadcast region, so with the exception of the opening shot, everything else is unique to that region to an extent. If it was a simple 'here's your template, add your map and places, press render' workflow like 2008 was, everything would be identical, shot for shot, across all regions. 

In 2008 a template/workflow was produced to enable the regions to simply modify the programme name, locations and footage and render their own (though I suspect the first iteration were again centrally produced, Midlands Today received some complaints that 'Leamington Spa' lost it's 'Royal' title, and swiftly added it in). Times changed a lot since 1999 though, much of the news rebrand was done in Smoke/Flame and took weeks to produce, and I'd guess if many of the assets were the same, the regional titles would be no exception.