1980 - H2G2 - the making of the animated graphics

In the Studio at Athos House, Hanwell

10 min 30 sec

click image on left to play footage
Some historical background notes on this piece

The story of how we got involved with doing the motion graphics for the BBC series is well covered elsewhere but this piece gives a sort of "fly-on-the-wall" flavour of the work in progress in the studio. This material was shot on VHS by Kevin Davies over a period in 1981.

There are clips shot during the early work for the Babel Fish for the test piece as well as stuff shot later when the remaining 5 and a half episodes of the production were in full swing with Dolphins etc.

Kevin was the cameraman and it was his own kit but I can't remember who was "assistant cameraman" for those shots that include Kev himself.

There was much banter about Kev never being around at the studio because he was always off up to the set and the gallery at the BBC hob-knobbing with the celebrities. But to be fair there is some evidence in this piece that Kev actually did do some work ... although that may have been specially acted ?

Seriously though, along with everyone else in the team Kev put in a lot of serious work doing fairly tedious manual labour. He was also after all solely responsible for the chance for us to do the work and was of course driven by his own passion and obsession !