PY Gerbeau's Rules of the Game - Production diary

PY Gerbeau's Rules of the Game was a series commisioned by the Open University to be shown during BBC TWO's normal scheduling to encourage viewers to study economics with the OU. PY Gerbeau is the man that used to run the Millenium Dome. In the series of three 30 minute programmes, he looked at three aspects of modern life with reference to ecomonics.

I was asked by Just About Productions to design a title sequence, astons and graphic sequences for the series. This had to be done in a very short time, within a very tight budget.

As I developed designs and animations for the series, I kept up a private web page that kept Just up-to-date with my work. These pages show how the work evolved in the short time available in the schedule.

April 26 2002

Initial branding ideas

I had a title sequence, astons and ten graphic sequences to produce. Before I could design branding that unify this work, I needed a programme logo. Here are some of the initial ideas I came up with:

My initial designs are usually in black and white - this allows for logos that will be able to be used in many different forms and colours across many media. I thought that I was going to use some geometrical device in the branding, so a chose a 'geometrical' font: the Futura family.

The title of the programme was difficult to design for: originally the series was going to refer to game theory - then the word 'Game' was the most important. Then 'Rules' came to the fore (seeing as economics are the rules that govern modern western society). The fact that PY Gerbeau was an important element is relevant. Also, the programme had three possible names at this point: 'Rules of the Game,' 'PY Gerbeau's Rules of the Game' or 'PY's Rules.'

After flirting with the idea of rectangles within rectangles, I decided on the circle and dots as a possible branding element, so I expanded on the 5th logo shown above:

May 1 2002

Intersecting circles

I developed the circles idea further.

I settled on this design:

This logo design allowed for an abbreviated version of the title of the show to be used in the aston design.

Now that I had a couple of branding rules, I created a rough idea for the title sequence. The idea of the sequence was to show the presenter as an active interesting person. As the title footage had not been shot, I used my flatmate as the star and shot my own footage. I developed the idea of lines of dots and grids of circles. I chose some library music, edited to the correct length, and produced the following rough animation:

I've used four cues from the music for pictures to appear. The fifth will be for the logo reveal, the sixth is for the episode sub-title (the blue lozenge) to come up at the end.

From the beginning of the process I needed to bear in mind the fact that this programme was going to be produced in 16:9 format with 14:9 safe. This meant that there needed to be content off the edge of the 4:3 area of the screen that wasn't essential to the design, yet didn't look like filler.

I also came up with some more logo and aston designs:

This version added an extra colour for the PY and a three line aston design:

Just asked me to explore what the logo would look like with a 'spherised' version of one of the circles. I also designed versions that showed how the colours can mix (which wasa easier to do when neither is black):

May 2 2002

Programme Three

The simplest graphic sequences were for programme three, which required a headline and a paragraph of information to appear whilst video appeared in a box on screen. Just supplied a VHS of the offline which I used for positioning:

The colours weren't final, but the copy and the framing were. The white box is the safe area for text within a 16:9 image that is being cropped down to 14:9 for broadcast on the BBC.