Antiques Roadshow - History of an Object: Art Deco Travel Posters
Final Promotional Spot for Antiques Roadshow
For more than twenty years, GBH's flagship series Antiques Roadshow, has traveled the country in search of inspiring stories of interesting objects. In order to promote the series for their new season, our creative team was tasked with creating animated versions of our appraisals, showing the history of objects in the show. The final product tells an engaging story of action and intrigue straight out of a film like Casablanca or Indiana Jones, while keeping to the branding and overall creative design of the show.
In order to build the animation, we first had to find the perfect objects by sifting through the thousands of appraisals Antiques Roadshow has access to. We settled on a series of Antique Travel Posters from the late 1930s and 1940s. The original appraisal was thrilling, and we wanted to connect the grandeur of the story to the dynamic Art Deco design of the posters. Art Deco's classic design style opened up many possibilities for extreme angles, bright colors, and captivating imagery.
After narrowing down which appraisal we wanted to use, we then took the raw footage from on set, and trimmed it down to a forty-five second promotional trailer. You can see a clip from the original raw footage below. As this appraisal comes from a 2003 season of Roadshow, we could only work off the images captured on camera, as no scans were made of the posters. This required us to creatively rebuild some of the images in the posters.
The next step was storyboarding and creating boards and assets. We settled on a design style reminiscent of news reels from the 1940s, as the story takes place in World War II, following a map through the destinations in the script.
We kept in mind the dramatic angles of the objects, as we wanted them to move within the background of the project and change perspective. We refined our visual design language and colors several times, pulling away from creating characters and instead keeping to the modes of travel described in the piece.
Rough Storyboards to Refined Storyboards to Final Boards
First Storyboards
Boardimatic with original pacing and frames. We changed some of the original content to fall more in line with the newsreel theme.
In order to represent the posters in proper perspective, we opted to design several objects from the posters in 3D in Cinema 4D. Using a Sketch and Toon style of flat rendering, this allowed us to keep the 2D look of the posters while employing dynamic camera movements. Along with effects and post-processing this allowed the final results and renders to fit seamlessly within the map design.
Finally we worked through sound design and within After Effects to make the entire piece look and sound like an authentic film reel from the 1940s (while letting the motion design shine through). We were able to integrate the branding from Antiques Roadshow to bring the whole piece together. Overall, the final piece was a resounding success and continues to play on air today.
