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Screen Magazine - Index

Screen Magazine - Screen Magazine: Vol. 29, Issue 17 - Index

WTTW Makes A Tiger From A Cow With New Design Suites
By Mark Carr
WTTW television station graphic
designer Margalit Neusner is currently
working on the station’s first ever 3-
D High Definition animated on-air
and online promotion for WTTW “Kids
Picks.” The promotion is the stations
first use of its design suites featuring
Adobe After Effects, Illustrator and
Photoshop, and features Lightwave
and HD capabilities which allows
the station to render animation
and other projects to make them
compatible with HD resolution.
The design suite has been with
WTTW for a while and has been used
in several projects for the motion
graphics departments. It has been
used mostly with 2-D projects where
3-D elements are incorporated to
spice up projects or to do things that
aren’t possible to do in 2-D. For this
latest promotion, the design suite has
been dominated by 3-D elements.
“It really expands our capabilities instead of having to plan
everything out 2-D,” recalls Neusner. “2-D’s great, you could
do so much with it [and] it’s really beautiful format, but with
3-D you can really expand the way people are looking at
design and animation and create a whole new world that
you couldn’t really create [with 2-D].”
The “Kids Picks” promotion is an interactive process where
the kids actually go vote for their favorite show and then
that show is actually shown. “So it’s really cool idea,”
says Neusner, “It really integrates the kids and makes
them feel like an active part of the programming.” The
website features a few selections of popular shows such as
“Wishbone,” “WordGirl,” “Super Why!” and “Fetch” where
viewers can log into the website and select from a list of
choices to pick Friday or Sunday evening’s show.
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“[The process] is a bit more time consuming,” recalls Neusner.
“When you’re working in 3-D, you really have to see how
things are going to look going in because if you’re making
corrections, it’s going to waste time. I created a very long
storyboard of about 3,000 pixels by 1,500 pixels and allowed
me to see how each scene would lead me into the next. I
didn’t quite end up looking like the storyboards…I ended
up having to subtract elements and to shift them.”
Neusner has had a chance to create some very interesting
and fun creatures for the promotion. She took pre-existing
creatures and transformed them using the suite. “I just sort
of shifted them where they used different polygons [and] I
just moved them around and I turned a cow into a zebra
and a cow into a tiger which was pretty impressive,” says
Neusner amusingly.
“It was sort of like seeing my way
through the dark. I [taught] myself
the processes and I had used the stuff
right before on a very limited bases.
Basically I’d really like to get more
involved in using it for more abstract
texture creation and things are just
much harder to do or much more
deep in texture or in dimension. There’s
definitely that part of me that just wants
to expand our capabilities and our
artistic dimensions as much as possible,
so there you go.”
http://www.wttw.com/main.taf