This morning the BBC launch the BBC Bitesize Daily, a massive offering to assist everyone who is home schooling. 106 x 60 minute shows is only the initial scope + dozens of side offerings for online. Alongside this they needed a kit of graphics to help the show come together.
That’s where we came in. For the last 3 weeks half the team at Mighty Giant have been busy delivering over 120 different graphics/stings/titles/straps, even the menu’s for the BBC Red Button.
Thankfully this didn’t come from a standing start. We had the brand assets and look from BBC Creative to work with. A big help as a starting point, but as anyone who works within a brands guidelines knows, sometimes a frustration. The brand is primarily built for web so we had to work out how to develop this into longer form animated graphics. I hope the team at BBC Creative think we’ve stayed faithful to their look.
The most challenging part of this was creating a fun kit of parts (it’s educational, but it’s also TV!) that we knew we could deliver. Right from the start we could see there would be a massive squeeze down the line when it came to delivering this volume of work. There would be no point building something elaborate that would take a week to render, or un-pick if the editorial changed. Sign off would naturally be late, and the nature of the job meant we’d have to be able to react quickly. For this reason we built the graphics in a simple modular format that we could re-version for all the different uses. Kind of a drag and drop set up. Everything could be swapped, everything could come in different brand colours, different durations, and for the 7 different age categories the programmes would be delivered for. We knew this needed to be quickly adaptable.
What I’ve particularly enjoyed is seeing how many people have been thrown into the project. We’ve worked across a fair few BBC and CBBC show’s over the last 10 years, so it’s been great to see all hands to the pump, from producers down to the composer James Kelly who has done a great job giving this an identity.
So this morning we’ll be watching, and looking forward to seeing what they’ve pulled off in that time. Our work on this is complete, although the BBC Studios will be busy for a few weeks yet delivering these shows. This morning they announced that two of the presenters are David Attenborough and Sergio Aguero, not your standard education offering, but then it’s not exactly standard times we’re living and working through.