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.
• The creative brain of your’s truly.