Concept and creative process
The brief was to design a lively trailer to promote the BBC’s carefully co-ordinated global broadcast coverage of the new Millennium. Mark Shirra recollects: “This was a really fast turnaround. I was given various bits of video footage by the producer. The 3D spinning clocks were done in Infini-D on the Mac and the numbers were set in my 2nd favourite font, DIN Mittelschrift, imported from Illustrator. The animation of the person getting out of bed was lifted from a royalty-free books of maps, symbols etc. I may have added another couple of frames in Illustrator to get it to work, before printing it out at a small scale, then enlarging that on the Xerox to get some breakup on the edges, before finally scanning it back in again to achieve a more organic look. All of the compositing was done in After Effects”.