Broken News | Mike Afford Media

5 continents, 25 channels, 227 reporters…
All the news you’re ever going to need in 30 minutes

The Brief

The brief for this show was to conceive and produce the channel identities for about thirty channels or channel strands for a 6-part comedy show lampooning the relentless march of 24-hour news. The aim was to go for a believable look first and foremost – the graphics were not intended to be comedic in themselves – the writers were quite clear that the graphics should look convincing enough to be the real thing.

I began by presenting ideas for the main channels (there were about 6 or 7 featured brands, some of which needed titles or stings in addition to name-supers and other on-screen architecture. As well as the main channels, I needed to produce convincing ‘on the day’ graphics, as well mock virtual studios and nearly 10 different styles for weather forecasts.

The whole project was produced mainly on a Mac with Photoshop and After Effects, but I also used Quantel Hal for some, and some 3D animations using a variety of different 3D packages. The lower-thirds were rendered in real-time using RTSoftware’s tOG platform.

P.V.S. NEWS

The ‘Broken News’ public service broadcaster.

PVS News studio

PVS News logo

PVS content graphics

The Cumberbatch

PVS content graphics

E.S.N. NEWS

Populist, gimmick-heavy channel somewhere between Sky and ITN. Features ‘Standing News’, reports from outer space, and a tendency to concentrate on what’s ‘coming up next’.

ESN’s Katie Tate

ESN News logo

ESN Standing News

Tell us what you think

ESN Standing News

ESN live by phone

I.B.S. NEWS

An American channel. Featured 3D curving straps for lower-thirds, a shiny bevel-heavy logo, and garish weather graphics.

I.B.S. reporter

I.B.S. studio

Look Out East

Local TV for East Anglia. The writers were keen for this not to appear too home-spun, but to be simple and clean, with ambitions. This was also one of the few strands to include the title sequence. And I couldn’t resist supplying Russ the weatherman with the most ludicrous zoom in from outer space to a graphic showing some fields for his weather forecast.

Look Out East studio

Look Out East titles

Here’s Russ with the weather

Look Out East reporter

So News

Celebrity gossip and suchlike in the mould of something like ‘Liquid News’. Spinning logo in plasmas, and ‘tabbed’ lower thirds.

So News studio

So News titles

Go Sports 1

Obviously a take on Sky Sports. Scores and stats slid about in the right hand panels. A double-decker ticker kept things nicely confusing for the lower thirds. The ‘blue fire’ channel.

Go Sports 1

Go Sports 1 logo

World Money Today

Financial strand featuring multiple correspondents from around the globe. I made a 3D and After Effects animation (an end resolve of the WMT monogram) as the tail end of a never-seen title sequence.

World Money Today reporter composite

World Money Today logo

Aronovitz

Bloomberg on steroids. A plethora of tickers going left and right and as many things spinning round as possible. There were some classic stocks scrolling around if you could be bothered to look out for them. My own favourite – ‘Evil Wizards’.

Aronovitz

15 seconds

Absurdly short news round-up, along the lines of 60 seconds, but much shorter. Hence the name.

15 seconds

Film and Movie News
Traffic-Round-Up-Date

Jonathan Ross-style shennannigans in Film and Movie News – bringing you all the latest news, reviews, and interviews from the worlds of film, and movies. Another of the segments that needed the impression of a full title sequence – we see only the end resolve on screen though. The traffic reports were something that I imagined might have had no design input in real life, so I left it well alone, apart from suggesting that we use ‘Arial’ if possible, in white, with a black drop shadow.

Traffic-Round-Up-Date

Film & Movie News

Various reporters

Various reporters – all called Sam. I had to do a number of stand-alone graphics for each show. Some of these were full CSO, so I suggested doing a few mock virtual studio set-ups. Some of the reported pieces were attached to the PVS channel, but most others were stand alone – as if they’d drifted in from some other (unseen) channel. I also got a chance to do, at last, the mother of all plane crash graphics.

virtual studio

plane crash

Other Channels

Here are some of the other channels that needed their own branding – often just for the lower-thirds. The tightness of the production schedule meant that I was designing these without seeing the studio set for each. So a few of the colour combinations on screen might seem a bit random – and some of them were turned round so fast that only a flat colour strap would do. The channel acronyms apparently all mean something appropriate to the bland and sedentary lives of 24 hour news junkies.