TeleG Talks About Rostrum

TeleG Talks About Rostrum

Michael Bayley-Hughes owner of Welsh production company TeleG Ltd, talks about the acquisition a year ago of a motion control rostrum system.  “It has revolutionized our work and given it a distinctive ‘look’.  Credits include Acme TV’s forthcoming Bob Marley documentary for S4C, the Welsh television company.
The software and hardware enables motion control moves on a rostrum or animation table to be created with simplicity. Essentially rostrum tables and animation stands have been used since before computer graphics, at a time when most special effects were created on animation stands, prior to the advent of larger motion control rigs and 3D graphics packages. But today there are still a number of these machines going strong the world over and in fact are seeing somewhat of a comeback.
Currently the only other alternative to a computer controlled rostrum system are digital-rostrum computer programmes which have their limitations using scanned images. There are difficulties in lighting in the same way and restrictions on zooming with increased pixelation, as well as delays in rendering the hi-res output.
Michael goes on to say, “Before we got the rig we would have to travel to Manchester or even London for any rostrum work which was totally unviable when material was coming in bit by bit during editing”. TeleG TV Ltd had been looking for a rostrum system with some difficulty for over three years. “We knew we needed a system to enhance the level of our work so we finally were lucky enough to track down a Mark Roberts system. We are now able to produce work on demand for instant access by our edit suite.”
“The rig can make sophisticated moves even on tiny objects, the size of a 10 pence piece, which would be impossible without such a rig and we recently did such a move on a Roman coin for our latest series. My intention is to make a production based entirely of archive stills shot on this rostrum.”