The Expert (1969)

Concept and creative process

Opening titles for a series about the forensic scientist Professor John Hardy, played by Marius Goring. The sequence began with the dramatic image of the programme title printed in Typewriter font on shellac and fragmented by an unseen impact. The fragments were roughly reassembled by an unseen hand to an almost legible state. A cut to the clean programme title led into a sequence of circular vignettes of microscope images, with the remaining credits mixing in and out of focus over them. The whole sequence was filmed on a rostrum camera and captured in-camera with the credits superimposed from cel overlays.
Colin Cheesman later became the Head of Graphic Design at the BBC until he left and joined fellow ex-BBC designer Bernard Lodge to form Lodge-Cheesman, one of the earliest independent motion graphics design consultancies.