Concept and creative process
Opening titles for the four-part 1981 comedy series of ‘Mike Yarwood in Persons’, starring Mike Yarwood with special guests, sketches and impersonations. Peter Clayton was the designer of the title sequence in which, over a slowly tracking and panning shot of layered coloured stars, a multiscreen of stills of Mike Yarwood’s characters built up in a series of jump cuts to create a background for a central diamond-shaped vignette. This vignette contained the star of the show performing his famous impersonations, specially shot using a motorised stills camera, resulting in a stylised live action performance. The logo of the programme was designed to incorporate the same vignetted diamond shape. Creating such a sequence would be relatively straight-forward in today’s digital era, layering images digitally over one another, but back in 1981 it was a different matter altogether. The sequence required meticulous planning on a paper dope sheet of instructions to the rostrum cameraman, who in turn needed skill, patience and tremendous concentration to capture the sequence in-camera. The titles involved a rostrum camera shoot to film the back-lit and top-lit artwork and the sequences of mattes necessary to composite the background images over the stars and the diamond shaped central vignette over all of the other elements. This was pushing the available technology to its limits with no margin for error - no mean feat!