L Kraker

 BUSINESS INSIDER | VIEW FROM ABOVE - ART DIRECTOR

Unlike any other Business Insider series, View From Above, has won many awards for its in-depth investigative reporting. The episode I worked on, “Four Gazans Show How War Devastated Their Coastline,” won a duPont-Columbia Award, was a Gerald Loeb Award finalist, and was nominated for a News & Documentary Emmy Award for its Outstanding Graphic Design. What makes this series so unique and award worthy is the use of satellite imagery maps –and, for video editing, that meant it was graphics heavy.

The main challenge with designing and creating this graphics package was to make it completely autonomous of a motion designer’s help. My approach was to view this through a video editor lens. Each of its 30 MOGRTs and templates would have the simplest navigation while offering every graphics scenario at their fingertips.

For example, I made After Effects map templates that used the Geolayers plugin and had all kinds of possible map graphics. This included geotags, circle and box highlights, map points, text on screen treatments, and a highlight and label combo they called “lollipop pointers.”

The best part of the map template was the transition from a wide to close up satellite imagery map. At the time I had just finished my first year judging the graphics and motion design category of the News & Documentary Emmy Awards and was in complete awe of Elastic’s motion design in Netflix’s World War II: From the Frontlines. In it, they featured a wide map that highlighted the countries and then zoomed in through the clouds to transition to a scene at that location. It was executed so flawlessly and I really wanted to take a crack at making something similar myself. The cloud transition was a success and I even managed to make it into a Premiere template for editors to adjust easily.

One of the most challenging MOGRTs was the title card. The show runners wanted something similar to the title sequence of the 2009 comedy-drama film, Up in the Air. It wipes through a variety of different aerial views. For View From Above, the title card and its transition on/off couldn’t be any longer than 5 seconds, so I was pretty limited on how many wipes and the amount of variety. In order to get the most aerial footage in, I opted to do three horizontal wipes from top to bottom and end on a 4 panel scene that kept moving until it wiped off.