The Grand Tour illustrations
In 1987 I produced a series of seven panoramic illustrations for Thames Television’s historical drama documentary ‘The Grand Tour’. The original panoramas were shot as a series of pans on a rostrum camera using 16mm film. The original movie film and five of the illustrations have been lost, but I fortunately retained a set of high quality 10×8 inch transparency film copies of all the art work.
I recently decided to have the old transparencies scanned so that I could produce high quality prints of the individual panoramas and also remaster the panoramic animations in high definition.
I was fortunate to find Tim and Charlotte at PDS. I was really pleased with an initial test scan they sent: all the fine details of the pen and watercolour illustrations had been captured from the sample 10×8 inch transparency. With a little bit of colour correction, I was able to produce a high resolution file that closely matched the quality and detail of the original work. I had no hesitation asking Tim and Charlotte to scan all the illustrations.
For the animation the files were lined up sequentially in Premiere Pro so that I could execute one continuous pan over the seven panoramas. The final product is considerably better than the original 16mm rostrum animation that was broadcast in 1987.
The remastered Gand Tour illustrations and animation will be incorporated into a forthcoming retrospective ebook covering a selection of my broadcast design work from 1980 to 2024.