September 15 2017 | By Kurt Kohlstedt for 99PI
Practical Effects: Physical Craft Behind Classic 3D Film & Television Logos
On and off for the past 100 years, MGM’s lions (seven different ones over the decades) have come alive on the big screen, sometimes even roaring at audiences. These iconic opening sequences clearly stand out as shots of an actual animal. In other cases, though, the physical craft of a filmed logo can be hard to decipher at a glance.
Take the RTF television logo, for instance, which looks basically two-dimensional. But “television history buff Andrew Wiseman unearthed this amazing behind-the-scenes shot of the Office de Radiodiffusion Télévision Française logo,” reports Christopher Jobson of Colossal.

To the eye of a digital-age viewer, the logo part of the shot looks like some kind of rendering or animation. But a behind-the-scenes look shows how practical effects made this sleek flyby possible, with a chrome-plated brass logo and model city with over 100 buildings. The classic rotating BBC globe effect (dating back to the 1960s) appears, if anything, even more abstract and less physical.
In fact, it employed a physical sphere and mirror. “After filming the rotating globe against a panoramic mirror,” writes Jobson, “it appears the results were then traced by hand similar to rotoscoping.” Oceans were painted black and land masses white — color was added after. While this all may seem like ancient history, some contemporary logos still use these classics for inspiration.
Read more about it on 99PI.
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