Bursting upon the UK television scene in the late 80s, Sky TV made - and continues to make - an impact. Through its merger with erstwhile rival BSB in 1990 to its current expansion into the burgeoning world of digital television, the company has built a powerful position in non-terrestrial broadcasting with over 5 million subscribers.

To keep up with the graphics demands of several analogue and well over 140 new digital channels, plus joint ventures and interactive digital TV projects, British Sky Broadcasting operates a well-equipped and busy creative services department at its headquarters in Isleworth, West London.

In terms of equipment, all the big names in dedicated professional TV and film editing and effects kit are represented at the Isleworth facility, but over the last two years a growing volume of work has been handled on Macs and PCs, offering not only much lower capital cost, but increased flexibility as well.

One of the agents of this change has been Adobe's After Effects. Now that desktop processing power is good enough to work to professional broadcast standards, After Effects is used for a wide variety of particle, scatter, lighting and filter-based effects, bringing graphic designers additional flexibility, and through its resolution-independence, some capabilities that the high-end systems couldn't match, such as handling high-resolution images to allow for clean wrapping of standard PAL screen images round 3D shapes or other distortions.

"Any idea you come up with can be done in After Effects," says Sky One graphic designer Jonathan Yeo. "It's great for designers who are not technically-minded computer people. You can go back and change anything at any point, making it dead simple to pick the best ideas."

"There's as much depth to the program as you're happy to use," agrees video effects designer Sten Sheppard. "I must have more than 350 plug-ins for After Effects. I think of After Effects as the socket wrench and the plug-ins as the sockets."

In addition to particle, light and filter-based effects, the Sky team extensively uses After Effects for grading, the colour correction process that can be used to match the characteristics of material from different sources (such as film or video), or exploited creatively to create mood and feel. According to Yeo, "You can't believe the difference it can make, After Effects can inject a real quality feel into the most unpromising source material".

The designers also appreciate the integration between After Effects and other Adobe programs. Illustrator is used for logos that are brought into After Effects as EPS files for subsequent treatment and animation, as well as being used to generate print materials to support the TV shows. Photoshop is also used 'massively' according to Yeo, who says that he finds switching continuously between the two completely logical.

Keeping TV graphics design fresh and constantly evolving is a key part of the challenge at Sky. Rather than imposing a 'computer generated' look, Yeo and his colleagues feel that After Effects allows them to keep on experimenting and pushing back the boundaries. "There are infinite levels of use," he says, "You can get a truly different result each time."

Freelance writer Michael Walker wishes he could use After Effects to brighten up the weather in Kent this summer.

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