On the week of aprox. December 16th, 2005, CNBC had rolled out a new brand that replaced the fun, flirty, edgy, aggressive package that was used when they relocated from Fort Lee to Englewood Cliffs, N.J. CNBC had been a close tie to Pyburn Films, a motion graphics design firm. They had done promos for CNBC before, and their previous graphics package before they moved. Whoever at CNBC was running promotions, apparently loves blue. Dark blue. Sick blue. Sick Building Syndrome Blue.
Before we go to late 2005 (of which I had watched a lot that first week of it’s new look because I believe I caught the flu, one of two instances before I caught COVID a year ago to the day.)
Fox 5 in Las Vegas has updated their graphics packages at least 3 times since a major change in early 2020. Since then, they have been sold by Meredith to Gray, which isn’t really the biggest caretaker of local media. Regardless, this station is pretty solid source for local news. Trust me, when I am in Las Vegas, I tune to 5 first before any other station. Of course this predated the new look with the awesome Propulsion Version 2 theme package from 615 Music.
This most recent update to the open just has high sex appeal, with really fast, snappy, alluring visual stimuli.It can only go down hill from here, right?
Just a reminder, this high sex appeal, is coming from a Fox affiliate! The logo originates from WNYW about 2 decades ago! Obviously the Fox 5 O&Os have ditched the logo, but it’s so ironic an affiliate can execute a really snappy, sexy eye and ear candy of a packaging. What did the O&Os do instead? Make the stations look like Sky News in Australia, or did Sky News take the O&O look from the states?
In case you want to see choppier version, but you can still get to see the sassiness
This is the best looking Fox affiliate in the country.
The production of Miniland’s Channel 2 News to close out Christmas evening in 2014 was one of my first major challenges in developing the credits to mimic Chyron or any other CG for that matter.
These Lego Creator kits were shot just days before Christmas, and a warmfront that hit the area on Christmas Day (the time and temperature bug that was shown was the actual temperature in my area at that time of day.)
Final Cut Pro 7’s character generation is not that sophicated, and resulted in out of the box thinking. I added all the names and positions into Microsoft Word, (hence the position was italicized) I then copied it in verbatim in the same formatting into Photoshop. If I recall correctly, I saved it as a Large Photoshop Format, then I believe I had saved it in PNG. By this point, I had a very tall and narrow transparent image.
I ingested it into Final Cut Pro, then properly sized it. Then I had to make a motion effect for it to scroll, so it’s kinda like the Ken-Burns-Effect but going from down to up. Another restriction in text generation in FCP7, was the inability to have any scrolling text past 2 minutes. The close ran for over 3 minutes.
It had to go even further. Because even for effects, such as a Ken-Burns-Image-Move, is restricted to 2 minutes. So I then exported the 2 minute close as a standard QuickTime. I then had to reimport this once again and then slow it down using the functions to slow down the speed. You now can mimic a 3 minute close.
There’s more to the story.
The snow effect that the credits was laid upon was shot on the roof of the garage to capture the fine snowflakes falling from the sky the Sunday before. I used the shingles of the roof as a “key” effect to blend in, blur it from being seen as the roof, to have the snow fall into the credit space.
The station was center-cut the Standard Def, so anyone was watching 2 on SD, they’d mostly the credits and a sliver on the right of the minifigs enjoying themselves.
These are one of the many elements I had done to replicate live-news-in-entirely post production.
Key tools:
Nikon D3200 DSLR Camera (I really don’t use it for video capture anymore…it was what I had for the time.)
Microsoft Word (couldn’t remember if I used the PC or the Mac)
Adobe Photoshop Elements (to do the text manipulation)
Apple’s Final Cut Pro 7 (to put all of this together)
Mac mini 7,1 i5, 500 gig storage, 4 gig RAM, integrated GPU.
Someone who is highly attracted to electronic graphics that appear on a screen used to consume information such as local or network news, that has high substance on reporting, but kicks ass on style, flashiness, snappiness, and attention grabbing graphics that may be for some extremely stimulating, and keeps the viewer tuned in and turned on! Remember journalism still matters despite a flashy newscast. At least you’re not trashy. Such attraction can be beyond the ChyronHego brand, such as Pinnacle’s Deko, Miranda’s Vertigo, VizRT (but don’t expect too much sex appeal), or Ross’ XPression. Or if you’re really cheap the Caspar CG.
Rebuilding Local Media with building bricks and minifigures as the subjects. Also the King of Simulating Live events in Post Production™.
