December 2017

Sports personality of the year 2017

Sports Personality of the Year celebrates the best in British sport with an award ceremony watched by millions. The much-anticipated shortlist was revealed on BBC's The One Show, and BBC Creative asked dock10 to help them build the shots to introduce the twelve nominees. We were tasked with transforming still images into slow-motion action shots that interacted with graphic titles.

Seth Bell, Post Producer at dock10, explains: "We worked closely with Tim Jones, Creative Director for BBC Creative, who had a clear vision of what was needed and an acute awareness that we'd need to work fast as the nominees would not be finalised until days before transmission. Tim provided us with the images at the earliest possibility, and thanks to a comprehensive brief for the composition and look of each shot we were able to push ahead quickly and confidently."

"I used a combination of Photoshop and After Effects to create and animate each nominee," says VFX Operator Chris Powell, "embedding text showing names and nicknames into the shots. The text was a major element and needed to integrate seamlessly into the action. To do this, I rotoscoped each athlete and animated them using the puppet tool so that they moved through and around the text. The revealed backgrounds were painted back in and distracting elements blurred out to draw focus on the hero image. A gold/blue colour gradient was added to enhance the shot's visual appeal in line with the show's colour branding, and finishing touches were added with subtle particle effects."

For social media, a longer edit was put together in Avid with an audio mix by Dubbing Mixer Lee Fisher: "The creative brief asked for the mix to be as bold and epic as possible, so I added extra resonance to the voice-over to make it punch through the driving music, whilst also creating a sense of space and depth. An undercurrent of cheering and applause added to the atmosphere." The approved edits were used on television and social media.

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