Concept and creative process
The title sequence for ‘The Money Programme’, the finance and business affairs series, which ran from 1966 to 2010. The designers created a montage of found footage and specially shot live action, edited to the familiar title music. Patrick Bedeau recalls working on the title sequence for ‘The Money Programme’. “The titles were designed and produced by me and Matt Wiessler, as external contractors to the BBC through our partnership Bedeau Wiessler. We were approached by the programme editor Diarmuid Jeffreys with a wide-ranging commission that also involved the set design.
I had worked on the launch of a show called ‘Here and Now’, which was a precursor to what is now ‘The One Show’ and took its influence from shows like ‘Nationwide’. ‘Here and Now’ involved creating a programme set within the production offices of the show and using this as part of the branding narrative. ‘The Money Programme’ wanted to take this to the next level. The titles needed to integrate into the studio concept and have a strong narrative about business and economics.
We shot the titles on Super 16 filming across the country, at the new Jaguar production line in Castle Bromwich, Birmingham and at Dinorwig Power Station in North Wales. We even got co-operation with British Airways, who let us film (including in the cockpit) during a flight to New York. We shot on Wall Street, Grand Central Station (stop-frame) and in Chinatown.
Myself, Matt and our Director of Photography, Gary Shaw, formed a small film crew and we shot using a hand-wound, modified 16mm Bolex Camera. The footage was then transferred and digitally graded to D1. We even got access to film Concorde but sadly didn’t fly to New York in it. Budgets were very tight on the project, so we used Adobe Photoshop to prepare the layers for the logo animation which was composited on a Flame at Soho 601. Using Photoshop to build up image layers became a cost-saving workflow to counter the high cost of Soho post-production at that time.”