News
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Babyland on ABC’s 20/20 this Friday
Been working on graphics this week for just about the saddest show ever: Babyland, our special edition of 20/20. You can watch the opening of the film here.
A little about what it’s about, courtesy of the press release:
There are places in America where the unthinkable is happening — too many babies are dying. In most cities, black babies are dying at three times the rate of white babies. That’s what’s happening in Memphis, Tennessee, the city with the nation’s highest rate of infant mortality. A baby dies there on average every 43 hours. But many people are working to change that startling statistic. “Babyland,” …
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My Work on ABC Next Week!
My company’s newest documentary, China Inside Out: Bob Woodruff Reports, premieres next Wednesday night (Aug 6th) on ABC. It’s a special edition of Primetime. I’m excited — it’s my first time I’ll have my graphics on one of the big four networks, and the logo I designed is already popping up in various places on the web.
It’s amazing how many graphics even an entirely live action film needs. Opening titles, logo bumpers for the start and end of every segment, locator maps, lower thirds, end credits — even the midbreak “…will return in a moment” is an animated clip. And on top of the show elements, there are web graphics, promo sequences, email ‘postcard’ promo images… the …
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Fresno Bee covers Making of a Law
Hey the Fresno Bee wrote a story about our Making of a Law film! They even mentioned my poor little bill character! (No relation to Bill of “I’m Just a Bill” fame — but I have to admit, it’s amazingly hard to talk about the legislative process without personifying the bill somehow.)
The film is part of what’s called The Constitution Project, funded by the Annenberg Foundation Trust at Sunnylands. The nonprofit group says it wants to improve civics education and public understanding of democratic institutions. In a related film, for instance, Imbriano examines a crucial Supreme Court case from the 1960s.
The films target a high school audience, or younger. A cartoon embodiment of the Wawona school bill walks through Capitol …
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On The Mend: Part II
I don’t really intend to turn this site into a personal blog. I have other places for that. This is for work stuff, as well as useful things like tutorials and downloads like shiny fractal wallpaper (more of that is on the way, as the original batch has proved to be surprisingly popular).
But I think the lack of updates in recent weeks merits explanation: I’ve been sick for a month and a half. It sucks.
My doctor thought it could be mold allergies, but that’s looking increasingly unlikely. It seems it may instead be one of those mysterious flulike things that just takes a long time to get over. I’m definitely making progress now, though, and hope to resume proper updates …
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Update: Earth 2100
The film contest/web game ABC News is starting launches today! First entries are due June 9th.
Click Here to download a PDF with more information and entry specs, or check out
Earth2100.tv.Get your stuff on ABC, guys!
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ABC News to Launch Online Film Competition
Found out about an interesting upcoming online game/film competition today at work. (It’s through ABC News, though, not DocGroup.)
In short: you create 1-3 minute films for the web about world conditions in the future, and the best ones become part of the broadcast series and affect the narrative direction.
In an unprecedented ABC News two-hour special airing this September, the world’s top scientists, historians, and economists will predict what the world could look like by the year 2100. Experts say that unless we act now, the “perfect storm” of population growth, resource depletion and climate change could destabilize the world with catastrophic results.
In order to tell this story we need YOU to report back from the …
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On the Mend
I’ve been sick for a couple weeks now, but the antibiotics finally seem to be doing their thing. Updates with slightly more content should resume shortly.
In addition to wandering around in a haze and attempting to sleep under my desk, I’ve been working on graphics for a series of short films about Japanese internment during WWII. Certainly not the cheeriest topic, but interesting nonetheless. I didn’t know much about it going in, so I’m learning a lot from this project — even if I can’t go crazy-creative with the visuals.
I’ve also gotten to design several proposals for documentaries my company’s hoping to put into production. I really like proposals. There’s just something very satisfying about the process: you’re taking something …
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Zora Neale Hurston: Jump at the Sun on PBS American Masters
One of the documentaries I worked on before I started at DocGroup is going to be on PBS American Masters this coming Wednesday. I did a lot of image restoration work and made the pictures move around.
This film was more than a decade in the making, and I’m really excited to see the results!
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It’s Photoshop Phriday!
This week’s Photoshop Phriday feature on Something Awful was “Reverse Magazines” — take a magazine, find the reverse of the title (i.e. Bad Housekeeping or Illiterate’s Digest), and make a cover for it.
So I had some fun with Cosmpolitan:
![A tornado stole my husband!](http://victorianece.com/wordpress/wp-content/uploads/2008/04/provincial-copy.jpg "\\"Provincial\\" Magazine")
My first Photoshop Phriday. And I got in! I’m very excited.
Check out the rest of the magazines, though — there are ten pages of covers posted, and lots of great ones.
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Stop working for free, guys.
Okay, so user-generated content is all the rage, and there are a million contests where you can make a commercial and win money.
I’m all for the democratization of television and whatnot. Putting your own short films on YouTube is one thing. But here you’re doing a huge company’s work for free. Win $57,000 for your video about ketchup? Sounds great! …until you think about how much Heinz would be paying an ad agency to produce just one nationally-broadcast commercial. But this way, they get a huge range of choices for free (tons of really creative people sent stuff in), and are getting the actual content they use at a discount.
Sure, it would be cool to see your work on TV, …
