Before joining Wildflame Productions, Carrie was a Senior Producer on a brand-new primetime competition format for Channel 4. Her most recent series, Nyrsys S4C is an observational documentary format highlighting the incredible work performed by nurses across Wales.
With a passion for history, Celyn has spent her time collecting and telling stories of extraordinary individuals from across Wales. Since joining Wildflame in , Esme has worked across the Wildflame slate: reinforcing the production management team and helping to assure all projects are run smoothly and efficiently.
Gareth has extensive knowledge of the business of production across all genres. He has an outstanding track-record in controlling large production teams and multi-million-pound projects.
Gareth has worked with all of the main UK Broadcasters as well as forging strong relationships with International Broadcasters and Co - Production partners. Leona has been with Wildflame since its inception and has a wealth of experience in a senior production management role working on regional and high-profile documentaries being filmed in various exotic and remote locations across the globe.
Her extensive experience spans some 25 years working across most programme genres. She leads on international content development, production and delivery of Factual Programming to Domestic and International Broadcasters and is part of the Wildflame Senior Management Board.
Lloyd returned to Wales and joined Wildflame working on international productions and has gone on to work with us on Wonderful Wales with Michael Ball for C5 and a major new living history project for S4C about Evacuees. Jonathan Shalit, OBE. With a background in Archaeology and Anthropology, Megan's passions lie with telling people's stories both past and present with real empathy and understanding. Having filmed in various locations all over the world, her previous work has included both award winning international productions such as The Wall and more recently delicate observational storytelling in Bois y Rhondda.
Fortunately there were some of those massage chairs in the shop that we extensively tested during the shoot! Wedding: A lighting based ident. We created light maps that could be added on top of various backplates with different actions.
There are 6 variations in total including different ways of picking up the glass and spilling it and various dog actions. The lights are actually moving and are not single frames. We have lasers gobos and other animated lights in this ident. The action is excluded from the light spill with hold out mattes. We had to roto al the humans and cheat certain light maps in order to create a realistic effect. We shot this in the Canton Liberal club.
As a matter of fact not much set dressing had to be done for this ident. The work men in the backplates are going into a loop of actions of movements that they would be doing if they were welding.
There were no sparks when they were doing the loops. During the shoot we captured hundreds of welding and grinding sparks at different speeds that we then keyed out and made little loops out of it. Each action had a start, middle and end. The middle bit is loop-able and once we put this back on the top of the action then it looks like they are welding. Again we used a rectilinear wide angle lens for this so that we got a nice looking image out of an ugly welding shed.
Carpark: Again we have a couple of different plates on this one. There is one with a van driving, another with busses etc. The cool thing here is that the van moves on top of the animated text and markings and the cones fall over once a certain volume levels is reached. We had to do some serious cleaning work as it was raining pretty badly on the day and the floor was very uneven. We had to remove all the wet patches and all the original writing so that we could recreate it in software.
This ident was definitely the hardest on to crack as we really wanted the markings to look realistic. The first thing we did for this was to make tool that would let you trace all the words and markings on the original frame.
The tool then created a vector drawing from this by un-projecting the trace so that it fitted onto a square and so that it was easier to see. The un-projected could then be transformed and then re-projected in a pleasing way with anti aliasing and hold out areas where the water and holes were. We now have an image that looked exactly like the original, but we could do anything we wanted to the text and the markings as we had them as vector information.
We now analyze the parameters in the voice and use this information to modulate certain aspects of the vectors. It kind of works like an illustrator file in which you can rotate and scale things, but again here in our software the transformations happen in real-time. How do to prepare? Once the locations were locked down we sat down with Proud and S4C and made a huge list of ideas of locations, objects and animals that could be voice-reactive in each ident.
I think there were 20 something pages. When we shot the first three idents and went a little crazy. The first ident had 6 different elements, some reacting to the voice, some to the music, some CG, some using filmed elements. The music was generated randomly via our custom made sequencer… it was pretty ambitious.
But the voice-reactivity was somewhat drowned out. So for the final seven idents, we stripped things down with just one strong reactive visual element for each ident, and a selection of background action plates for variation and mood. We did animation test before the shoot and we had a pretty clear idea of what we needed to make the clips work. They involved turning hundreds of lights on and off, trying to keep the background conditions as fixed as possible.
With the Welding Shop, we needed to get enough footage of each welder so that we could comfortably build a loop. These idents took most of a day to shoot. Some were a lot simpler. Some idents involved placing 3D elements in the scene — the Lighthouse, the floor-polisher wires in the Museum and the Car Park. We took plenty of measurements for these, scrubbed out the original elements from the plates and then just worked at it until we got code which was fast enough to replace those elements in real-time and still look realistic.
They can select what ident they want to play and what elements they want to sync to the voice. This was actually quite a tough part of the job. Getting a piece of software to that point where you can deliver it and leave it somewhere without blowing up takes a long time and a lot of effort. That said it is early days as the idents are being played out gradually in and around their previous idents.
Minivegas: The audio idents have been specifically designed to surprise, for example with a female announcer the reactive element can be very subtle — then you see the same piece with a more pronounced male voice and the elements appear to go wild: at that point the viewer may just go — did that just move with the voice? Also both English and Welsh languages affect the animation of the elements completely different as the rhythmical qualities are completely different. This was a big sale for the channel as they are a bilingual broadcaster.
The idea is that these idents are subtle and that the viewer gets a feeling of surprise at the point that they do notice the visuals reacting to the voice, this may be the first viewing but equally it may be the fourth time.
Minivegas: The concept is about showing everyday scenes of Wales in a new light. Minivegas: Yep this was a huge challenge. We were developing on a machine with 2GB of RAM and we also wanted the application to run on our laptops so there were certainly some technical limitations. We devised several cunning compression and playback schemes until we finally managed to crack it.
Most of the other idents stream an uncompressed AVI as backplate and holdout matte and on top of that we draw geometry or we play back compressed elements. We shot a clean plate and then with out moving things in the scene we shot each light individually and then calculated the spill by subtracting the individual lights from the unlit clean plate. These image files are bit floating-point files and in some cases over 50, were then applied on top of the backplates with various animation curves to make the lighting scenarios come alive.
For every frame, the software needs to quickly analyze the audio data, read in the backplate from disk, decompress and animate the foreground elements and then finally composite everything, all within 4 hundredths of a second. Initially we were worried about pulling off realistic composites in realtime, but by the end the animation had proved equally daunting. For example, if a forklift responds to a loud cough, a human animator can animate slightly ahead of the event, giving the forks the momentum to rise to the top at the exact time of the cough.
If the forks move to the top instantly, it looks wrong. You need to cheat and pretend you knew about it, rising as fast as you can. I saw the film on BBC 2 not too long after it was released, which must have been around We really do need to have better access to Welsh films and TV programming.
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