To shoot the 30 HD live-action international overview IDs,
UVPhactory sent a team to South Africa, where it worked with local production
services company BLM Productions. The crew spent 35 hours in a helicopter, shooting
over Johannesburg, Durban and Cape Town with a Panasonic HD Varicam on
gyro-stabilized camera mounts. Footage of beaches, metropolitan cities, deserts
and wilderness we all captured during the shoot.
UVPhactory creative director Alexandre Moors says the
mandate was to capture beautiful shots, knowing that there would be no post
effects added to the imagery.
Animators and compositors back in New York created the high definition 3D animated logos. The Al Jazeera logo was
broken down into the different letters, which would be spun around and
reconstructed in different sections using different texture elements such as
cloth and liquid.
The Handmade section,
which represents the arts, has a painterly gold feel. Technicity heralds technical advances and has an ultra modern
feel. For Tradition, which
represents cultural events, the studio employed reds, yellow and the look of
silk, giving it an Arabian look.
UVPhactory used Softimage|XSI 5.1, Syflex Cloth Simulator,
Next Limit's RealFlow fluid simulator, Apple Final Cut Pro 5.0, Adobe After
Effects 7.0, Adobe Photoshop CS and Adobe Illustrator CS to execute the
project.