Another bit of revision to remind me of stuff I used to know how to do.
There were two Olympic events held in 1972; the Winter Olympics in Sapporo, Japan and the ill-fated summer Olympics held in Munich, West Germany.
These would have been the first Olympics shown in colour on BBC1, although the 1968 Summer Olympics and Winter Olympics would have had colour coverage on BBC2.
Paul Fox, the BBC1 controller at the time, would probably been very pleased that Germany used the PAL colour system, so he wouldn’t have to air hours of the orange mush that was early 70s standards-converted NTSC. And, as a bonus, thanks to the EBU circuits the commentary wouldn’t sound like a very bad phone line during a thunderstorm.
In honour of these massive technical wins, a special BBC1 Olympic Symbol was commissioned. Corey A. Murray found a screenshot of this symbol in the book BBC TV presents – a fiftieth anniversary celebration by Nicholas Moss and, unable to find any trace of it online, recreated a still image of it and posted it to his DeviantArt page.
According to Mark Radbourne, a member of Transdiffusion’s All Talk Group, this was a mechanical model, apparently very similar in nature to the recently introduced Open University model, consisting of the interlocking rings rotating into view from left to right and then staying formed up.
One interesting thing about this model is that according to Corey A. Murray’s recreation, was it had a white caption and orange rings.
Normally, BBC1 presentation symbols were cyan on black. BBC2 were more adventurous with their colour schemes, using three colour luminance keying, but BBC1 were resolutely monochrome with their colour symbols.
Therefore I thought the most likely explanation for this colourful logo was that there was one model created that served for both BBC1 and BBC2. There was probably a caption on a door that could be swung over to brand it for each network and the symbol could be fed through to BBC1 when needed just as the Open University’s symbol was.
I thought that this would be a nice, quick Blender project for me to get myself used to working in Blender again. And it sort of was, but it sort of wasn’t.
The first thing I do with any project of this nature is to create the graphics for the symbol as an SVG in Inkscape. I can then import the SVG into Blender to animate it.
I had a very similar Blender project, the rotating BBC2 cube used from September 1971-December 1974 so hopefully the camera and luminance keying would be all set up and ready for me.
The project consists of a camera, a box and two lamps and mirrors the setup in the Noddy room (albeit in a rather minimalist way).
I made the rings in black, with white faces. I gave them a little bit of thickness, but they could just as easily have been paper thin. I just thought they would be more robust that way. I gave the rings a crease on the edges, so they didn’t fall apart when I added a Subdivision modifier.
When animating the rings, I had to cheat a bit. I thought I would simply had to spin the rings from 0 to 90 degrees on the Z axis. In fact I had to make the left most rings start a couple of degrees before 0 and the right most rings a couple of degrees after 0 or they would be visible.
To my horror, my Interlace twitter wasn’t working at all in Blender 5.2 LTS. I think I’ve talked about it before, but interlace twitter is the very, very slight moving up and down that keyed symbols did.
What I had done to create this effect in the past was to put a driver on the Z position of the camera and then use a little Python formula to jiggle the camera up and down almost imperceptibly to get the interlacing effect on the models. It’s subtle, but it really makes these recreations live. This no longer worked in Blender 5.2, and my camera was resolutely stationary.
What I had to do instead was to select the Z location of the camera on Frame 1 and add a Key frame.
Then I needed to add a Noise Modifier to the Z location. This allowed me to make the Z location of the camera move up and down randomly based on the Strength value I gave the modifier.
Another problem I had was the keying. Although I could get my universal Blender luminance keying set-up to work, I think I am going to have to work this out again from scratch as it gave me no end of trouble this time.
However, eventually I managed to get something out of Blender, and here it is.
It is unlikely that the BBC1 1972 Olympic symbol got much use in the second week of the Olympics, given the tragic events that unfolded there. However, it may have been dug out again for the Winter Olympics. I’d love to know if it was. I think it was a very nice effort by the BBC’s presentation team and a very good idea.
BBC1 would do another very naughty1 Olympic symbol. I had recreated this before, at the same time I had recreated John Mundy’s BBC1 North West globe.
If there was one good thing about the Munich Olympics, it was the graphic design of the games themself created by Otl Aicher and his Dept. XI team. That lived on for many years as the symbols were adopted by ITV’s World Of Sport and used for many years for the various sports it showed.
- These symbols were naughty as the IOC strictly forbids combining the Olympic rings directly with non-Olympic logos or channel text to form a single “composite” graphic.
The 1984 symbol is even worse than the 1972 one as Rule 7 and the accompanying IOC Brand Guidelines strictly state that the five Olympic rings must never be altered, deformed, severed, or integrated with external imagery. The interior of the rings must remain completely clear and unobstructed. ↩︎
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