G Spots

While I was producing a title sequence for the "A Shower Of Shot" documentary, Rory Clark asked me if I would also produce some little animations that would appear in the documentary itself.

Rory had decided to break the documentary into sections, with the title of section being a word beginning with the letter g. He asked me if I would produce a few seconds of animation that would introduce each of the sections. He gave me a list of words "girls, gifts, gags, gaffes, etc." and let me get on with it.

I started by creating all the words Rory gave me in Inkscape, and exported them all for import into Macromedia Flash 8 as .eps (Encapsulated Postscript) files.

Why don't you build yourself a word...

My first idea was a bit too elaborate; I got carried away, which I often do! I produced an apple on a gradient background...

...that gets hit by a bolt coming out of a crossbow...

...smashing the screen...

...and revealing the name of the section underneath.

Rory gave me a bit of much needed direction and said he simply needed the word "golden..."...

...which would then be hit by a bolt...

...you'd see a flash...

...and with a quick shudder...

...the title of the section would be revealed.

Another thing Rory asked me to do was a breakdown caption. One of the things he remembered about watching "The Golden Shot" as a child were the breakdowns caused by technical difficulties, strikes or IRA bomb threats. These were the joys of live television in the 70s.

Obviously there was no argument about the style - Rory wanted an HTV holding transparency in the style we both remembered from the seventies which was handy as I would have probably given him one of those anyway! I selected a suitably naff publicity shot of Bob from a selection Rory sent to me and recreated in Inkscape what we would have seen in Wales and the West in the case of one of the aforementioned catastrophies.

The polyester clad stars of Wednesbury Co-op cheese counter...

Another thing Rory asked me to do was to add, for technical reasons, a few seconds of grey onto the beginning of the ATV Colour Zoom. Whilst I was happy to oblige, I suggested that he might also like to add this:

A fitting place to finish, I think.

I created it by tracing the caption that appears on the front of a telerecording of the last Golden Shot Bob presented in 1972 after he had been sacked for no reason whatsoever by Francis Essex. I used Inkscape to create the entire caption -  I couldn't face drawing something as fiddly as this in Flash anymore! I must be getting old...

And with that, my work on the "A Shower Of Shot" documentary was done.