Multimedia journalism

UNC tackles After Effects for News21 promotional video

UNC has officially launched their News21 project, “Powering a Nation.” I blogged about their work back in June as the reporting process was just getting started. Now the site is complete and, frankly, amazing. (And I’m not just saying that because I am a fellow Tar Heel … spend a few minutes on the site and you will see for yourself!) Most importantly, check out this intro video that sets the scene for the rest of the massive project. Done in a fashion similar to “The Girl Effect” meets “Choosing a President,” this video is a must see …

[If video does not display here, watch it on the site's homepage]

I asked graphics producer Ashley Zammitt for some insight on how she created this inspirational video:

“It was all made in After Effects, with art I made in Illustrator. It was my first project in After Effects and I struggled at first, but I really fell in love with the program throughout the process.

We worked on it all summer with lots of other design projects, so I don’t know if I can give you a specific number for how long it took – but it seemed to go on forever, haha. A lot of time went into writing the script with Sara Peach and Melissa Moser, with Andy Bechtel as our coach and I spent hours and hours trying to perfect the storyboards with my coaches, Dan Niblock and Mike Schmidt. Melissa did a great job getting Illicit Recordings to let us use Little People’s “Start Shooting” for the background music and it only took a few readings to get her narration right.

Once we had all of that down, I had to put it all together in a program I barely knew. It might have been a little too ambitious for the amount of time we had, but UNC’s News21 team was all about being ambitious.

Either way, it needed to be done quickly.

Then there was the added pressure that it would be on the homepage. It’s the first thing you see when you come to our site and it needed to grab a user’s attention while succinctly and beautifully conveying Sara’s ideas about how energy and demographics fit together.

So it needed to be done quickly. And it had to be perfect.

Mike had also warned me about how tedious the animation would be, and he was right. It was tedious, and after weeks of drawing and re-drawing, animating and re-animating, I hated the whole project. Dan and Mike assured me that hating your work was part of the creative process, so I spent a few long nights in the lab and hammered it out. In the end, everything turned out so well – and I owe a lot of it to my team. I’m very proud of the project… but to be honest, I won’t complain if I never hear that script again, haha.”

Make sure to check out the rest of the stories on the finalized site, Powering a Nation. Kudos UNC team on a job well done!

Other posts that might interest you:

• UNC launches News21 multimedia project
• Analysis of 2009 Carnegie-Knight journalism sites
• Special Olympics uses twitter, multimedia to document Winter Games

© 6 August 2009 Innovative Interactivity (II).