ITV Creates

Disguise brings new ITV on-screen idents to life.

Launched in 1955, ITV has long been renowned for creating and distributing thousands of hours of high quality content on a variety of global platforms. At the start of 2019, the leading British broadcaster launched a unique year-long project intended to emphasise and reflect the creativity at the heart of the business.

Fittingly named ITV Creates, for each week of 2019 a different artist will create an artistic piece based on their expression of the iconic ITV logo. These will then be filmed and produced as a set of on-screen idents by ITV’s in-house creative agency, ITV Creative, and a different logo treatment will appear on-air week by week.

The team sourced and curated a plethora of artists for this project from a diverse range of backgrounds, and the final line up comprises a mix of up-and-coming and established artists, working across many disciplines of visual arts.

One of the first eight artists announced as part of the ITV Creates idents project is Ravi Deepres, an award-winning artist, photographer and filmmaker who has an international reputation for focusing on the intersection of still and moving images. Having already worked on creative marketing campaigns for ITV in the past, his strong relationship with the broadcaster put Ravi in good stead for the project.

As a longtime user of Disguise solutions, Ravi once again utilised the system to bring his vision to reality. “There was a lot of material which I hadn’t used in way’s like this before and I was excited by ITV’s concept of inviting different artists to put their individual signature on one of the most recognised logos in television.” The setup featured a large scale model of the iconic ITV logo which was used as the canvas of the project. Ravi used Disguise’s solo media server to project a series of overlapping, moving images onto the model, creating a stunning collaborative visual.

“For ITV Creates, we required a flexible solution that could respond on the fly to change in real-time, as well as keep up with a quick paced television shooting environment. It also had to interpret abstract footage and then map it in a detailed and extremely accurate way onto a complicated 3D object, but which would also allow for a quick set up and line up. Disguise's technology platform, combining the real-time 3D visualisation and high performance, was the ideal solution for the job.”

Ravi made use of QuickCal for calibrating the projector positions. “Being able to drop reference points directly onto the projection surface within the 3D visualiser and have the software automatically start calibrating the outputs in real-time without requiring any content re-rendering made the intricate mapping easy,” he says.

The collaborative nature of the Disguise solution was also helpful for this project, as Ravi also explains. “Working as part of a wider team to bring the ITV Creates project to life, everyone on the project was able to view, comment and adjust right up to and including showtime.”

Ravi’s ITV idents appeared during the first batch of creations for 2019. His next use of Disguise technology will be seen on two prestigious upcoming projects at the New York Met and Opera houses.

“I use Disguise throughout most of my work,” he says. “From the planning stages for projection studies, to the actual show playback systems - Disguise products like the solo server and QuickCal are integral to what I do. They are great for both small shows with just a couple of projectors, to large ones with over 1500 square meters of projected surface.

“QuickCal is also particularly helpful with absolute accuracy of rendering any 3D object due to Disguise's calibration algorithm which takes the virtual reference points and links exactly to their corresponding real-world points. My work is often challenging and QuickCal offers a reliable and proven resolution,” he said.