THE STORY OF TV GRAPHICS

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History

When television began back in 1936, it brought with it the potential to enhance the visual experience with the possibilities of information graphics. However, the history of graphic design in television is one area which lacked any serious consideration in the early days, resulting in limited resources and under investment for many years.

It was nearly 20 years after the launch of BBC Television, that its first full-time graphic designer was employed, John Sewell, in 1954. This was also the year when the first in-vision weather forecast was broadcast, presented by George Cowling. The visual onscreen maps were drawn by hand in the London Weather Centre, before being couriered across London. They would later be replaced with magnetic symbols in the 70's, computer generated maps in the 80's, to the current high-end 3D graphics powered by MetraWeather's Weatherscape XT.

The Early Years

During this era of black and white TV, the quality of broadcasts and receivers were limited to a resolution of only 405-lines, resulting in pictures suffering from poor definition. Up to 20% of the screen was considered unusable to the graphic designer, due to the lack of focus around the screen’s border, coupled with the fact that different television sets cut the picture off at different points.

Because of this, graphics created for TV had many restrictions. Lettering had to be large and bold, routinely created by sticking white Letraset characters onto black card. Credit rolls were special devices which used long strips of black material onto which the Letraset was stuck, and which were physically rolled, either by an electric motor, but more often than not by hand. Any illustrations to grace the screen in those days had to embrace fairly heavy lines, lacking any fine detail.

The restrictions were, of course obvious. People were needed who could be trusted to check the spelling and achieve a balanced design layout, and one or more cameras had to be allocated to view them, in an era when a studio would never have more than four cameras.

These images above show how news graphics were originally made by hand, using cardboard and celluloid for maps and charts. An embossing machine was used to print the type for captions. The graphics department would look more like a decorators workshop, as these images illustrate...

Graphics on Film

The movie industry was no different in the 1950's. Saul Bass (1920-1996) became the first significant motion graphic designer in these early days, designing the opening title sequences for many popular films such as The Man With The Golden Arm (1955), Vertigo (1958), and Psycho (1960) among others. Bass was an extremely talented and productive designer, and is commonly cited as being a pioneer in the field of motion graphics. During this period all graphics were created by hand or on film, and were extremely time consuming and expensive to produce.

Introducing the Character Generator

The first electronic device to radically depart from this crude way of creating onscreen graphics was the Riley character generator (CG), developed in association with the BBC, which would later give way to the more successful Aston in the UK (below), and Chyron in the US, where both names became industry standard generic trademarks.

My first role as a graphic operator back in 1996 at Teddington Studios involved using a fairly hefty, robust beast called `Collage' by Pixel Power, yet whenever I was asked to play out a name strap, the director in the gallery would refer to it as an `Aston', or `Name Aston'. This is something that would never really change in the years since my first job in TV. I would go on to work in international sales roles at both Pixel Power and later Vizrt, yet even today I have seen Vizrt name straps (or `supers', which is the correct terminology) still been referred to as `Astons' in many broadcast centres, even with monitor labels in a gallery displaying this trademark name.

The early 3D character generators surfaced in the 90's, using bespoke hardware. Processing power was such that layouts had to be rendered before they could be used, and extended animated sequences were impossible because of memory limitations. The Quantel Paintbox was heavily relied on to create background images and full frame stills (a very fast, easy-to-use, broadcast-friendly version of something like Photoshop.) I remember working at Anglia TV and having to create a news story map by capturing a road atlas under a rostrum camera, and creating an image from it in Paintbox. Hard to believe now, but that's how it was back then.

Launched in 1981, and years ahead of its time, the Quantel Paintbox was a dedicated workstation, primarily used in the production of television graphics

User interfaces also tended to be rather less intuitive than we would expect in today's Windows-driven market, and operators needed an extended period of training. That was actually a major obstacle in the wider use of character generators: there was a shortage of well-trained operators, and once trained on the preferred machine, they tended to resist moving to another manufacturer and using another device.

Today's Graphics

Many of today's graphic operators now have to be 3D designers too, often possessing a whole range of additional skills to their portfolio that were not required back then. Being competent in 3D design to create elaborate and exciting real-time 3D graphical stories (or even virtual sets) is sometimes not enough these days. Having the ability to handle complex datafeeds, integrate to newsroom systems, or to create advanced templates is often expected these days of a freelancer in the market. Many of these designers even come equipped with their own kit, which makes it handy for entertainment shows on limited budgets, who only require a rental model as the production may only be running for a few weeks at a time.

Sports graphics for broadcasters are often farmed out to graphic production companies such as Delta Tre or Alston Elliot, who specialise in providing operational staffing levels, equipment, and design on fixed term contracts to the likes of BT Sport, Sky Sports, ITV and of course BBC, where I experienced this first-hand during my time as Graphic Producer at BBC Sport.

Sky Sports presenter Will Greenwood between head-to-head VR graphics of opposing fly-halves Farrell and Wilkinson

There is also a huge rise in the need for CG graphics in master control. The multi-channel world has created a whole new television concept - channel branding. Where that once meant just a simple bug inserter, now there is a need for more advanced devices, creating sophisticated branding sequences designed to stop the viewer’s finger hitting the remote and keep them loyal to the channel they are watching. 

Credit `squeezeback's' provided here by Pixel Power, wrapping the branding in multiple windows around the end of the programme, are seen by broadcasters as a powerful way of retaining viewers without reducing the amount of commercial time they can sell (not applicable to BBC and EastEnders!)

The Future

As was the case for its history, the future of broadcast graphics depends largely on its medium, the television, which is going through a substantial change at the moment, probably one the biggest changes since its conception. Although advanced 3D computer generated graphics are part of the content viewed on television, newer technologies have made it possible for these graphics to become highly realistic, perhaps shaping the way in which audiences view and interpret content via television and the web.

Through the use of innovative virtual reality and augmented reality technology, graphics have reached another level to engage viewers through quality, visually absorbing live content, seen to great effect on recent election broadcasts, and used weekly on flagship sport programmes like BBC's Match of the Day and Sky Sports Monday Night Football, that rely heavily on graphical content combined with innovation. Virtual studio graphics now sit alongside and are visually-indistinguishable from the physical-set elements, meaning graphics need to look photo-real, and the tracking must be accurate enough so that when cameras move, the rendered virtual graphics would exhibit a seamless blend between reality and virtual.

MotD makes extensive use of the Viz Virtual Studio for augmented reality

Monday Night Football - a design innovation that gave the virtual set an illusion of having a much larger physical set in the studio

As the industry is gearing more towards VOD and OTT, and the next generation of audiences are forming habits of viewing 2nd screen devices on tablets and mobiles while watching TV, this is creating the need for more interactive forms of broadcast graphics. The younger generation are much more engaged, less passive viewers, who need to be entertained through various form of social media and live interaction. 

I was introducing the 2nd screen companion app, and live social media interaction to the industry back in 2011 with never.no, but discovered the technology and concept was slightly ahead of the curve back then. I found programme editors and producers slightly wary of audience-created content being aired on their live shows, and procurement teams not entirely sure what the value of such technology was worth at that time. Obviously this has since changed with production teams, who now recognise the importance of these social media tools to engage more effectively with their audiences. 

Bringing it all together, Chyron is partnering with ConnecTV for its companion app polling technology, Never.no for its social TV platform, Mass Relevance for its real-time curation and Vibes for its text, Twitter and web voting technology

Broadcast graphics will continue to push the envelope when it comes to producing high quality, visually stunning accompaniments to informational television programming, as long as television as we know it still exists. But how long that will be, who knows...

About the Author

I have seen many changes, and been through many different experiences in the broadcast graphics sector since I began working as a CG operator in 1996, which is why I feel well-placed to write and share this blog.  I freelanced as a Paintbox designer and CG operator in the 90's, before heading up a graphics division at Granada TV. This led to an international sales career with Pixel Power, Graphics Producer at BBC Sport, UK Sales Manager for Vizrt, Sales Director for Vizrt India, Business Development for never.no and MetraWeather, and Project Managing the roll-out of Vizrt for BBC Wales.