Mike Afford Media BLOG

Latest news, observations, and the occasional comment


Mike Afford Media Joins NewTek Developer Network

Mike Afford Media Joins NewTek Developer Network
to Bring More Eye-Catching and Innovative Virtual Sets to TriCaster Customers

Dublin, Ireland, September 11, 2014

Mike Afford Media, a boutique broadcast graphics company delivering high-end motion graphics and virtual studio sets to clients worldwide, announced today that it has joined the NewTek Developer Network to provide customized virtual studio sets for NewTek TriCaster multi-camera live production systems.

Virtual sets allow customers to present their on-air talent within a modern television studio set without the expense and physical space requirements associated with constructing and maintaining a static set.

Virtual studio sets designed and created by Mike Afford Media for TriCaster are available as add-ons independently through virtualstudiosets.com and are supplied as a TriCaster VSE-ready layered Photoshop document with UV gradient layers in place for each live input and real-time reflections.

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A Taste of Britain (BBC 1)

I recently completed the graphics for a new BBC 1 series A Taste of Britain presented by Brian Turner and Janet Street-Porter. A Cactus production for the BBC, the show sees Brian Turner and Janet Street-Porter travelling around the country sampling some of the local produce and cooking up some tasty dishes while also taking a look at some of the local heritage and traditions of the area.

The series started today, and is on Monday to Friday for the next few weeks at 3.45pm on BBC 1.

I designed the location maps for each of the 20 episodes, as well as doing some animated illustrations for the title sequence and the programme logo (below).

A Taste of Britain graphics

And here are just a few of the many maps I made for the show, each one lovingly hand drawn with a 2B pencil, scanned and then animated in After Effects.

A Taste of Britain : East Sussex

A Taste of Britain : East Sussex

A Taste of Britain : Norfolk

A Taste of Britain : Norfolk

A Taste of Britain : Cheshire

A Taste of Britain : Cheshire


TriCaster Virtual Set for Mustard TV

A custom built TriCaster Virtual Studio Set running on a TriCaster 8000.

Custom TriCaster studio set for Mustard TV

Custom TriCaster studio set for Mustard TV

I have recently completed a set of Virtual Studios for Mustard TV – one of the new local TV channels in the UK. Based in Norwich and broadcasting to the local Norfolk TV region, Mustard was awarded a local TV licence in September 2012, and started broadcasting on Freeview, channel 8 on March 24th 2014. Mustard TV Ltd is the broadcasting division of Archant (of which Jeremiah Colman, of Colman’s Mustard fame, was one of the original founders).

I built 3 bespoke virtual sets in all, and this is the first of them which they are using for their News programme. The studio was built in Cinema 4D Studio and as supplied as a ‘TriCaster-ready’ layered Photoshop file which they imported into TriCaster VSE and is now running daily on their TriCaster 8000.

They were a nice bunch of people to work with and I wish them all the best of luck with the channel. I’m also very grateful to Chris from NewTek for taking the time to guide me through the TriCaster side of things .


Premier League Live : Virtual Studio

Recently completed a new VR studio set for Setanta Sports’ Premier League Live show. This is a completely new build, with the 3D model created in Cinema 4D with motion graphics for the two virtual screens created in After Effects. As always, this is a fully real-time rendered virtual set, running on RT Software’s tOG platform.

Premier League Live (Setanta Sports)

Premier League Live (Setanta Sports)

The team in Dublin are able to choose the relevant football club badges for each show to appear in the virtual hanging screens at the back of the set.


Weather Symbol Font

weather icons

92 glyph desktop font

OpenType, TrueType versions
plus complete @font-face WebFont Kit

Price : €20
Add to cart

92 glyph Weather Symbol Font

It’s taken a while, but I have finally got round to converting a couple of my Weather Symbol Sets into font format. Here’s the first one, based on the original TV style weather icon pack and adjusted slightly to work as single colour symbols.

These icons were inspired by the classic BBC Weather symbols (never bettered!) and were originally based on the Met Office codes for the various weather types that BBC Weather covered with their traditional symbol set. I’ve since updated my own set to 92 symbols, including many extra conditions (tornado, dust, smoke, volcanic ash) and combinations (thunderstorms with snow, thunderstorms with hail etc.)

I’ve also included a complete WebFont pack which includes everything you need to embed the font on your webpage, or within your app, using the CSS feature @font-face.

(Update : I’ve also just added a table with all the World Weather Online condition codes and the corresponding HTML character number and symbol for day and night downloadable as a text file)

Obviously there are a few advantages to using the symbols in font format – you can use CSS to display them at any size, in any colour, and with text effects, and the whole thing is extremely lightweight in terms of file size and hence loading times are very quick.


Year in Review Sport : Virtual Studio Set

Recently completed a virtual set for another Setanta Sports show – this time a series of programmes looking back on the year in Sport. Based on, and using elements from Sean Hunt’s lovely title sequence.

Year in Review : Sport (Virtual Studio)

Year in Review : Sport (Virtual Studio)


Christmas drinks…

We all like a little tipple at Christmas, sure we do. And while I think of it, here’s another title for a Waitrose TV series, all about Christmas drinks, presented by Phillip Schofield.

Waitrose : Christmas drinks

Waitrose : Christmas drinks

Another cheeky After Effects move built from various bits of actual footage provided, as always, by our good friends at Stepping Stone Media.

You can watch a little clip below…
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Surf Compass – wind and swell data visualisation for Hotswell.com

Hotswell.com is a new surfing website that I’ve been occasionally involved with over the past 2 years. The Hotswell Beta site has recently gone live and is already getting some great feedback.

I’ve created a complete set of surfing icons that appear on the spot guide page for each location (break type, wave direction, optimals, hazards etc).

I’ve also designed some little data visualisation devices like this one – the ‘Surf Compass’.

Surf Compass - surfing data visualisation

It’s basically a little graphic that sits on top of the Google map for each location. The centre dial shows wind speed and direction. The outer dial shows wave height and swell direction. The compass will show the current data for any particular surfing location and will update itself when the timeline is scrubbed on that page.

The ‘ideal’ or optimum wind and swell directions marked on the compass as feint little bands which change colour to gold/orange when the arrow enters the optimum zone.

This ties in with the warm colour scale (yellow – orange – red) used throughout the site to represent increasingly favourable surfing conditions – culminating in a ‘hot’ (red) 5-star rating.

It is actually quite easy to scan all the locations in your region at once to see where the best breaks will be over the coming days and then to check the surf compass for a particular location to see exactly when swell and wind combine (perhaps with the optimum tide) to produce the best possible chance of great surfing conditions.

I think the site really comes into its own when the marker on the main timeline on each break page is scrubbed along and every single relevant bit of data on the page updates instantly to show the conditions for that particular time. I’m told by Tim, the technical wizard behind the code, that the site’s break pages “update the html elements via jQuery and lots of javascript code. The compass and tide box are HTML5 canvas elements”.

Here’s a little montage of images showing the development of the Surf Compass from the early ‘3D’ version where I tried two separate dials with the ‘wind’ above the ‘water’, through to some versions nearer to the one that appears on the Hotswell site.

Surfing graphics development


Making small changes – video series

Another little title for a Waitrose TV series…

Making small changes the Waitrose Way

Making small changes the Waitrose Way

The graphics were based on the real cork noticeboard hanging in our kitchen at home, lovingly recreated as a massive After Effects comp with footage inserted into some of the pictures. Displacement maps to simulate the shiny surfaces on some of the photos.

You can watch a short and sweet video of the title sting, below.
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