I’m Famous!
Okay, I’m not famous but I did have my first custom TV graphic put on the air for Fox Business Network not too long ago and I’m sure at least one million people saw it. The graphic aired during the Lou Dobbs Tonight show for a story about methamphetamine use in North Korea. How anyone in the U.S. knows about meth use in North Korea when the North Koreans don’t know what’s going on in North Korea themselves is an interesting question but it was talked about very convincingly on Lou’s show.
I must say that I was very nervous starting at FBN but the graphics staff there have been nothing but super nice, professional, incredibly patient, and supportive. The whole system in which a graphics order is made and passed over to the designers and then passed back to the producers so the graphics can be plugged into VizRT (not too sure how to explain this program but it seems to me to be the program that controls all the graphics that you see on TV) and put on the air is pretty cool. I never gave much thought to how the graphics system worked, I just remember saying to myself that I could do that, especially when I looked at the over the shoulder graphics made for the local New York City news. How hard could it be to do that? Well, it’s harder than you think but FBN, and I’m sure other networks have a similar system, has an incredible “bank” of templates for pretty much every type of still graphic that they air. What kind of templates do they have? Generic fullscreens, custom full screens, logos, baseball cards, head shots, cyber images, maps, promos, graphs (line and bar!!), and a ton more. Phew!! Below is the file that I handed off to the producer and the image below that is the way the graphic appeared on my TV on FBN. So, I guess I’m a tiny bit famous…
