Show Open

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Secret, Strange & True

BROADCAST: SHOW OPEN
ROLE: Lead Flame Artist / Senior Broadcast Designer
CLIENT: TechTV
ART DIRECTOR: Rick McKee

An episode of “Secret, Strange, and True” once featured an exposé on the Pentagon, and how it was actually constructed as a giant satanic portal for evil to be channeled into the world. Whether that’s true or not is certainly up for debate. But it paints a pretty accurate portrait of what this TechTV documentary series aims to achieve. Sensational. Mysterious. Provocative. Outrageous. True (at least to certain parties).

Unexpectedly, the show open isn’t nearly as enticing as the content would suggest. But that’s a conscious choice. Rather than upstage the given show’s content, it seemed more appropriate to ground the visual design in some manner of artful legitimacy.

This translated to a typographical treatment, where each of the title’s three words is visually defined through abstractions of motion and color. “Secret” is red and caged like a mystery. “Strange” is green and amorphous. And “True” is blue and framed with geometrical structure.

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TechLive

BROADCAST: SHOW GRAPHICS PACKAGE
ROLE: Lead Flame Artist / Lead Broadcast Designer
CLIENT: TechTV
ART DIRECTOR: Rick McKee

The signal heard round the (virtual) world. That’s the concept behind this dynamic show open for TechTV’s nightly news magazine. The premise centers on the motif that everything is digital, with information comprised of bits and bytes, shuttled around instantly at all times. And the only barrier being bandwidth.

Particularly tricky was designing the show open’s mid-section accordion segment, a content area that could expand and contract time-wise, based on the given evening’s teaser footage. As the open was designed to be a seamless flow of information, when the graphic elements halt to focus on the evening’s content, the momentum still needed to be present. The solution, surprisingly, was a straight cut, bridging the gap between inserted content and the lead-in to the logo resolve.

The “TechLive” open was awarded the BDA Bronze in the category for News Programming In-House Open.

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The Tech of:

BROADCAST: SHOW GRAPHICS PACKAGE
ROLE: Lead Flame Artist / Lead Broadcast Designer
CLIENT: TechTV
ART DIRECTOR: Rick McKee

This remarkably in-depth TechTV documentary of “how things work” focused on just about everything: newspapers, oil tankers, high-rise demolition, football strategies, bridges, ice breakers, paper clips, etc.

For the show’s on-air design, the visual concept was based on the digital analysis of the everyday world. In this case, a building, a car, a newspaper, and a train. Oil tankers and ice breakers were tempting, but none were immediately accessible for filming. And although the paper clip would’ve been classic, it just didn’t have the immediacy we were looking for.

My clearest memory was shooting without permits in Oakland’s BART station. It was a year after 9/11. Tensions were still high. We were almost arrested. Luckily, our producer knew how to run interference.

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CES Today

BROADCAST: SHOW GRAPHICS PACKAGE
ROLE: Lead Flame Artist / Lead Broadcast Designer
CLIENT: TechTV
ART DIRECTOR: Rick McKee

Back in 2001, the annual Consumer Electronics Show was the ultimate tech-fetish fest for the latest and greatest offerings of gear and gadgets. It was also considered one of TechTV’s major newsworthy events.

TechTV on-air personalities provided extensive floor coverage of the convention, offering exclusive in-depth interviews with developers and CEO’s, as well as awarding “best-of” accolades for all the show-stopping services and products.

For the concept and visual design, the process started with a barcode, a piece of printed technology branded on every consumer product. Through a freeform exploration of image and motion, the barcode was extrapolated ultimately into the show’s identity and branding.

Consequently, this resulted more in playful eye-candy than high-concept metaphor. But given that it’s basically a news magazine one-off, that proved to be completely appropriate.

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Big Thinkers

BROADCAST: SHOW GRAPHICS PACKAGE | PROMO
ROLE: Lead Flame Artist / Lead Broadcast Designer
CLIENT: TechTV
ART DIRECTOR: Rick McKee

This show package was designed for TechTV’s slick and cerebral 2001 documentary about contemporary futurists, scientists, pioneers and artists. “Big Thinkers” profiled such people as author Douglas Adams, entertainer Penn Jilette, futurist Alvin Toffler, virtual reality pioneer Jaron Lanier, and former FCC chairman Michael Powell, to name a few.

From a design perspective, the visual component needed to be contemporary and classy, full of metaphor, yet equally straightforward.

This lead to the concept of a waterdrop to symbolize an idea’s birth. As the drop falls, the impact results in expanding ripples, each circular wave representing different disciplines of thought: science, art, philosophy, metaphysics, universal consciousness, etc.

Pretentious, yes. But most appropriate, given present company.

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Titans of Tech

BROADCAST: SHOW GRAPHICS PACKAGE
ROLE: Lead Flame Artist / Senior Broadcast Designer
CLIENT: TechTV
ART DIRECTOR: Rick McKee

During the technology industry’s peak at the turn of the millennium, tech tycoons like Bill Gates, Steve Jobs, and a handful of others were leading the charge. To chronicle their achievements, former tech-centric network TechTV commissioned the weekly biography show “Titans of Tech.”

Capturing the essence of these captains of industry lent itself to a typographic approach for the show’s graphic design. Words, both descriptive and defining, were chosen to characterize the personalities of those leaders being portrayed.

Much like an infinite crossword puzzle, these words snake and slide into view, forming a grid of intensifying descriptive language. As more words enter the grid, they begin to form the faces of these iconic titans, until only faces comprised of the data-matrix remain.

To accomplish this, the words were individually animated to travel along the grid, with grayscale values of the positive and negative spaces used to create the facial definition of the featured individual. At the time, my skill at coding expressions wasn’t advanced enough to achieve the given effect procedurally. So I settled for the old-school frame-by-frame approach to the animation. Time consuming, but effective.

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