This article was published on March 14, 2013

The BBC kickstarts its ’90-years of innovation’ campaign with a CGI short featuring a few familiar faces


The BBC kickstarts its ’90-years of innovation’ campaign with a CGI short featuring a few familiar faces

Founded in October 1922, the BBC has long grown beyond its initial ‘British broadcasting’ roots, offering global services in the form of BBC World News, BBC World Service and even an international version of its catch-up TV service iPlayer. It’s fair to say the BBC is a global media brand, and one of the world’s largest broadcasters in terms of number of employees.

With that in mind, the BBC has launched a new campaign to celebrate ’90 years of innovation’, telling the story of broadcasting, engineering and technological progress since 1922. The campaign will run throughout 2013, so you can expect to see a lot of trumpet-blowing emanating from BBC towers. To get things started, the BBC has created an interactive timeline of BBC innovation.

But to mark the campaign launch, it has produced a neat 60-second film to show how it has progressed over nine decades, tapping archive footage to highlight key moments and milestones. Using animation and CGI techniques, familiar characters from these clips walk through time from one scene to the next, including John Cleese, Freddie Mercury and, erm, Morph. This will be broadcast on-air for the first time this weekend.

 

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