They would do better with something like Victoria Derbyshire has, an animating montage of stills from around the patch (viewer submitted weather photos? Possibly an issue that they wouldn't be able to credit the photographer I guess) in the same kind of grid format used in the titles.
They beauty of that is you could have photos from the East or West only for the sub-opts, and a mixture for the pan-regional parts.
You could even come up with some metadata based algorithm to only choose photos from areas that aren't being featured in the news (so if it's a Leeds-heavy news day the rest of the patch is still tenuously represented), and possibly that were taken at roughly the right time of year?
Only danger of animating montage of pics would potentially be when the go from a recorded interview back to live/recorded version trying to make the interview as live. If you know what I mean!
That's the route they probably should have gone. Would be interesting to know the geography of these new studios - it does seem nowadays they'll always go straight for the fake backdrop route even if it was possible to get a real view of either the newsroom or an acceptable view out of the window.
A newsroom background presents problems if it's recorded:
1. Time of day - if there's natural light.
2. Empty newsroom at early and late bulletin.
3. Size / layout of the newsroom does not always fit with studio screens and finally
4. Presenters in image when they're in studio presenting.
It's nice to see Calendar's new set but I agree with the comments about the backdrops. If the black spaces were blue or teal it really wouldn't look as bad as it does now. And that generic fake gallery backdrop is hideous...
That's the route they probably should have gone. Would be interesting to know the geography of these new studios - it does seem nowadays they'll always go straight for the fake backdrop route even if it was possible to get a real view of either the newsroom or an acceptable view out of the window.
A real view of the newsroom wouldn't be possible on Calendar unless they bulldozed a few walls here and there. And even then, their current newsroom doesn't look particularly nice on screen!
When I first saw the backdrop, it looked like an error. Surely the screens behind Christine and Duncan are meant to represent windows? If so, why doesn't the view fill the screens top to bottom rather than those awful black strips?
