News from the RTS this month
London's take on Amsterdam
London Centre offered a review of IBC's weird and wonderful exhibits at the end of September. The annual media technologies conference and exhibition had welcomed more than 55,000 attendees to Amsterdam earlier in the month.
The key question raised by IBC (International Broadcasting Convention) was: "How do we take technology and new ideas and turn them into innovation?" said panellist Vali Lalioti. The Professor of Innovation at Antwerp Management School added that, for broadcasting, the answer should be: "when this new technology allows you to tell your stories even better".
Lalioti's personal highlights from IBC included 3Dragons' 360° 3D display, the Holo-Deck, which uses hologram technology. The company is hoping "by the next Olympic Games to turn the carpet in your living room into a [virtual] swimming pool in which you would watch the swimming events", she said.
The Co-editor of technology information platform The Broadcast Bridge, David Austerberry, reckoned the letters IP (internet protocol) "came up at every press conference – everyone was moving to IP or offering IP-connected products. The only time I heard SDI [serial digital interface] mentioned was on a strapline, 'SDI is dead'."
Austerberry was also taken by Ericsson's plans to launch its "TV Anywhere" in 2015. "It is integrating mobile phones, televisions and video on PCs and tablets," he said. "You get exactly the same viewing experience on whatever device you're watching.
"The demonstrator was watching a programme on his phone as he came in from work and the system in the home detected his phone over wi-fi and he was able, in effect, to throw the picture from his phone on to the TV."
Austerberry said that Ultra-HDTV in its 4K variety – with pictures approximately 4,000 pixels wide – "definitely seems to be taking off". But added a caveat by praising Dolby Vision's new high-dynamic-range TVs, which "were showing pictures in HD, not even in 4K, on a 50-inch screen and they looked absolutely stunning."
He asked: "Are we doing the right thing in rushing into 4K and 8K? Should we be looking at better pixels rather than more pixels? I think there's a lot of mileage in the route that Dolby is taking in trying to make better pictures, rather than going for huge pixel counts."
BT graduate trainee and the 2014 RTS Young Technologist of the Year, Bobby Moss, agreed that 4K products were ubiquitous at IBC and confirmed that "BT Sport is going to use 4K in the next few seasons".
"The consensus that we got from the conference was that there is a certain size of TV before you can really see the benefit of 4K – you're looking at 40-inch and bigger," Moss said, adding: "4K will become a mainstream broadcast standard around 2017-18. There's also the possibility of 8K by 2020."
Simon Gauntlett, Technology Director of the Digital TV Group (DTG), agreed that ultra-HD was around the corner, but added: "If you said, 'I want to launch a 4K service tomorrow', you would struggle. Although lots of the bits are available, putting a complete end-to-end chain together at the moment would be very challenging."
At IBC, Gauntlett was impressed by Rovi's programme search and navigation technology. He said: "You could talk to the EPG [electronic programme guide] in a [voice recognition] Siri kind of way and ask, 'When are the Gunners playing?' It would know that the Gunners were Arsenal and you were talking about football and it could tell you the time of the next match."
By Matthew Bell
Animators celebrate BBC's Rose
French animateur extraordinaire Sylvain Chomet provided his own unique contribution to a special RTS celebration of the prodigious talents of BBC Bristol producer Colin Rose at the end of September.
Chomet donned heart-shaped glasses and sang a special version of La Vie en Rose via video, a fitting finale for an audience of some of the world's leading animators and programme-makers at the city's Watershed arts centre.
Rose worked with Chomet on the multi-award-winning animated feature Belleville Rendezvous .
Rose was in conversation with BBC Radio 4 Drama Commissioner Jeremy Howe, one of his many protégés from a career that has spanned flagship documentaries and arts programming.
Career highlights include the much-loved BBC Two documentary shorts series 10x10 and working in the animation unit. For the latter, Rose and his team developed a new generation of film and TV talent, commissioning the likes of Aardman Animation's The Wrong Trousers and Rex the Runt.
The audience included the Aardman team – Nick Park, Peter Lord and David Sproxton – as well as many of Rose's BBC contemporaries and collaborators, including Jeremy Gibson, Peter Symes and Director of BBC England Peter Salmon. There were places, too, for the next generation of talent – students from the University of the West of England's undergraduate and postgraduate animation courses.
The evening was introduced by Salmon, who also presented Rose with the RTS's Sir Ambrose Fleming Award for an outstanding contribution to the industry.
"I'm a dyed-in-the-wool West Country person and the award means a very great deal to me. To be honoured by one's fellows in one's own territory in this way is as good as it gets," said Rose.
The event was put together by the RTS Bristol Centre and Watershed arts centre to mark 80 years of the BBC in the city.
By Lynn Barlow
Les Coates honoured on home ground
Not many people nowadays accomplish half a century in the same job – even fewer in the same locality. But Les Coates has not only been a freelance TV cameraman in the North East for more than 50 years, he has also worked mainly for the same client — the BBC in Newcastle.
Coates used his first film camera at the age of 17, but it was following his 18th birthday that he officially started his first TV job. Now approaching 70, he received an RTS Special Award from the North East and the Border Centre, presented to him by Centre Vice Chair Garth Jeffery at a lunch for family and friends at a Yarm hotel in early October.
The archive video clips showed the changes that Coates has seen over those 50 years – the first was from a documentary on the mid-1960s rivalry between skinheads and "hairies", including footage taken by Coates on the back of a motorbike with a wind-up Bolex, shot over the rider's shoulder.
At the other end of the scale was a typical Look North "and finally..." about a noisy cockerel on a housing estate, shot in full HDTV. Stories in between showed the variety of work a regional news cameraman is called on to do, including being caught in the thick of picket-line action at Wearmouth Colliery in 1984.
Despite hip replacements – one done and one pending – Coates hasn't stopped yet
When Margaret Thatcher took her famous "walk in the wilderness" on Teesside three years later, Coates was there – and again in 1992 when she and John Major returned to view the regeneration of the Thornaby-on-Tees site.
Coates recalled filming another world leader — ex-US president Jimmy Carter in a replica of the Oval Office at his home. During the interview, someone kept trying to open a creaky door. "Shut up and get out" was sternly mimed by the sound recordist.
The intruder was later identified as ex-First Lady Rosalynn Carter, who believed she was supposed to be involved in the interview with her husband.
Officially, Coates was due to retire last year when he reached his half-century, but despite hip replacements – one done and one pending – he hasn't stopped yet.
His two sons, Karl and Jon, who followed him into the family trade, look as though they'll be competing with their father for jobs for some time yet.
By Graeme Aldous
Irish film legend who discovered Valentino
Film-maker Ian Graham gave the Republic of Ireland Centre a wonderful insight into Irish silent movie director Rex Ingram at RTÉ in mid-October, which he illustrated with excerpts from his 1993 documentary on the Hollywood great.
Ingram left Ireland for the US in 1911 and moved to Hollywood after studying at Yale University School of Art. He discovered and cast Rudolph Valentino in The Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse , and went on to make The Conquering Power , The Prisoner of Zenda and Mare Nostrum .
Ingram despised the haggling required by the Hollywood system and quarrelled with his MGM boss, Louis B Mayer. In 1923, he moved to France, where, working from his own studios, he directed films of his choosing.
In his later career, Ingram acted as a mentor to the young Michael Powell. He made one talkie in 1932 but, unimpressed by sound, retired from film-making.
Graham has directed four major films on James Joyce, including The Scandal of Ulysses. He is also a film historian, specialising in American cinema.
By Charles Byrne
New life for 1960s TV icon
What do you do with one of Britain's most iconic buildings, BBC Television Centre, when it closed for business in March 2013?
Sell it and lease some of it back, is the short answer, but the details of its decommissioning and rebirth make a fascinating story.
The tale was told at a Southern Centre event, "The rebirth of Television Centre", in late September by Lynden Potter, Andrew Wheeler and Andrew Fullerton, all members of the BBC team responsible for the project.
TV Centre opened in June 1960 and its cultural associations are well known, having been home to the likes of Blue Peter, Monty Python, Only Fools and Horses and Children in Need. But it was also the base for the BBC's International Control Room, a worldwide communications hub that moved out only at the end of last year.
Knowing smiles from the audience greeted the decommissioning team's description of the scale of the job they faced: 22 satellite links, more than 7,000 circuits, miles of cabling and "giddy over-patching" from the past meant cable cutting continued long into the night.
Some links, often the ingenious work of long-gone engineers, were undocumented. This made many individual switch-offs an act of faith, carrying the possibility of losing Washington or the iPlayer feed to the Home Counties.
Financially, the BBC has profited. Apart from redistributing more than £4m of TV Centre kit around the corporation, it sold the site for £200m to developer Stanhope – and retains a share of future profits.
By Gordon Cooper
The inspiration behind Peaky Blinders
Midland Centre teamed up with BBC Drama and the Writers' Guild of Great Britain to invite Steven Knight to the George Cadbury Hall Theatre in Birmingham in early October to discuss his award-winning BBC Two drama, Peaky Blinders.
In a wide-ranging career, Knight has written the Jasper Carrott TV vehicle The Detectives, scripted Stephen Frears's film Dirty Pretty Things, for which he was nominated for an Oscar, and written and directed the well-received 2013 film Locke, starring Tom Hardy. He was also a co-creator of the game show Who Wants To Be a Millionaire?
Peaky Blinders, which has just finished its second series, was inspired by stories told to Knight by his uncle and parents. 'They are stories of Birmingham,' said the writer.
"How do you create characters? Just let them talk"
Set in the 1920s, the series follows the exploits of a Birmingham criminal gang, notorious for the razor blades sewn into their caps.
Knight offered encouragement and advice for anyone wanting to write. 'How do you create characters? Just let them talk. Everyone can write dialogue,' he said.
Knight said that he was committed to working in Birmingham and to campaigning for more facilities, including film studios, in the city.
By Dorothy Hobson
Ashford Vikings pay their way
Republic of Ireland Centre members were invited by Vikings executive producer Morgan O'Sullivan to visit the set of the History Channel drama. It is shot at Ashford Studios in County Wicklow, just under 40km from Dublin.
At the height of production, more than 300 cast and crew work there.
At the end of September, RTS members were shown around the three sound stages: the 2,800m2 gasworks stage; the 1,350m2 box stage and the Christmas tree stage.
As well as using the two larger sound stages, Vikings, which is now in production on series 4, is also shot on the large back lot. A lake in the Wicklow mountains is used for the seafaring scenes.
Following repeated requests from O'Sullivan, who brought The Tudors to nearby Ardmore Studios, entrepreneur Joe O'Connell built his own film studio. The result was Ashford Studios, a state-of-the-art, €22m film and television facility that serves both Irish and international producers.
In 2013, the independent film, TV drama and animation sector contributed more than €168m to the Irish economy, up 18% on 2012.
"Econimically and culturally, film is important," said James Hickey, Chief Executive of the Irish Film Board.
"It is a key part of the Irish economy."
By Charles Byrne
Welsh Digital Fund appeals to developers
Launched in 2012, S4C's£4m Digital Fund supports digital content, primarily in the Welsh language, that can generate a commercial return on investment. The Welsh-language channel's investments range from £1,000 to £150,000.
At a Wales Centre event, held in Cardiff at the end of September, S4C Corporate and Commercial Policy Director Elin Morris and Digital Manager Huw Marshall explained how the fund operates to an enthusiastic audience of digital content producers and games developers.
"We want to see ambition – products with their roots in Wales, but with the potential to go global," said Morris.
Marshall explained that there was a paucity of apps in the Welsh language, but he enthused about the potential for co-operation with global partners such as Microsoft.
"We're a bilingual nation and there is great potential to use Wales as a test bed to develop content for international audiences," he said.
"We want to see ambition – products with their roots in Wales, but with the potential to go global"
Last year, S4C developed Enaid Coll, based on the popular game Master Reboot, which was the first Welsh-language version of a console game.
Co-funded by the Welsh Government, the concept has been picked up by CBBC, which is currently talking to Cardiff-based indie Cube Interactive about a spin-off project.
Marshall said that S4C is looking for a console game linked to this year's centenary of the birth of Dylan Thomas, adding: "The Xbox is big in Wales, but we will export our content to PSP and Wii, as well."
By Hywel Wiliam and Tim Hartley
