Elizabeth Kraker

BUSINESS INSIDER | LIVE EVENTS - BROADCAST DESIGNER & GRAPHICS OPERATOR

In the year leading up to the 2020 presidential election, Insider hosted 3 live events – something they’ve never done before.

Charting into new territory, the Insider News team was given the task to produce two town halls with Andrew Yang and Seth Moulton and one GOP debate with Bill Weld and Joe Walsh. And, as their only motion designer, I was ready to take on the challenge of designing and creating all of the motion graphics (especially with having to design, create and deliver a 20+ graphics package within a 2 week timeline).

On the side of my day to day work, I spent all of my free time in the control room learning how to use NewBlue Titler Pro. And, with very few tutorials and solutions for glitches and bugs, that ended up being a month-long challenge before the first live event.

After getting a hang of the program I was able to make lower thirds, a live countdown and question prompts that animated in and out. If need be, I also put in the options of being able to change the text and colors during the live events.

For the rest of the graphics I took inspiration from other news channels’ political graphics and the stage curtain.

With the box and box options, I wanted to have something simple, yet dynamic for the background. So I stuck with the gradient from the stage curtain and added a slightly transparent border around the boxes to separate the two. To not attract too much attention to the background, I then made the animated lines thin and hollowed out the stars.

After designing and making a title sequence and animated end credits in After Effects, the only thing left to deliver were still graphics. That included the Business Insider bug and designing a “we’ll be live soon” and “technical difficulties” graphic that matched the stage curtain’s gradient.

Of course I never thought we’d end up using the technical difficulties graphic, but we surprisingly did, not once, but three times during the GOP debate. I have to say though, watching The Daily Show’s coverage really made me feel loads better after the whole debacle.