Idents That Aren't What They Seem

[Neil Jones]

Having had a shufty over the road at the TV Forum archive, primarily because I was looking for something and also because it's still largely force of habit two weeks later to go there by default I spotted this:
https://tvforum.uk/forums/post1118789#post-1118789

Unfortunately most of the videos embedded in the thread have vanished from YouTube but other examples are available. The discussion was valid: Very surprising to find out that idents were still primarily model based as late as the Carlton set from 1999 and the fancy effects are CGI around a physical heart.

Of course physical models weren't limited to the idents, as the later titles to Blockbusters showed:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kKhnVvHWJ3A
http://www.dirtyfeed.org/2016/09/blade-r...fternoons/ for how they did that, though it lost the significance of why it started on a shot of the earth when front caps were dropped, and a lot of the finer detail is crushed in the YouTube machine.

Astonished to learn that all these apparent marvels of CGI were physical models all along. Next we'll be finding out that the first Channel 4 ident was just Martin Lambie-Nairn throwing a load of coloured blocks onto the floor.

What other wonders of idents we thought were all CGI and turned out to be real?

[swaggyboi128]

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=i1NKoMNy5bY "HBO in Space", 1982
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QbyND58E5Eo BBC 2, Paint, 1991

[Rob]

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=i1NKoMNy5bY "HBO in Space", 1982
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QbyND58E5Eo BBC 2, Paint, 1991

You don't need to put URL tags around YouTube videos, just copy and paste the links in and they'll appear in the post.

[channelbox]

I only just learnt that the BBC1 "smoky globe" from 1991 was a physical model.

[Mike]

There were lots of these over the years, the 1997 BBC family ident was one small example where you'd assume it was all CGI but it wasn't, instead being strips of ribbon filmed on a high speed camera.

The News 24 and World idents from 1997 were also real physical flags filmed and then edited together.

And of course the 1999 cream and red BBC News titles had physical elements filmed and shot within them (the globes, maps, clockfaces, glitter for breakfast and so on).

[Transmission]

Some slightly more recent ones that used a physical model (being projected on):

https://youtu.be/lwGWwyQ11yM