So, for the past few months, I’ve been thrown in at the deep end of a complete overhaul of the London Live Brand Refresh. Thankfully with Creative Agency ‘TellyJuice’ doing a lot of the heavy lifting on the overall channel branding / identity, I’ve been afforded the opportunity to pay some special attention to our somewhat neglected News and Current Affairs presentation elements. Making sure all of the working parts get updated and wherever possible made more efficient through some of Chyron’s pretty nifty (yes I said ‘Nifty’) automation and Intelligent Interface settings. This being especially important for the fast pace and quick turnaround nature of the news industry and that expectation being placed upon our already quite compact news team.
I’ve had to sift through years of ad-hoc graphic files (each further diluting the now 3-year-old brand guidelines) and disseminate a tight list of essential parts to be delivered fully functioning in our Chyron Live graphics system. Which prior to this rebrand no-one had much of an idea how to use.
If creating makelists is not your preferred cup of tea then perhaps the two weeks I spent nose deep in Lyric Pro help files is more up your street. As after a single days training it and the passing help of a kind-hearted member of our tech team was all I had to get up to speed and able to deliver a fully functioning kit of parts for the News Team replete with the usual ‘In/Out’ and ‘Update’ animation variants, and easy to populate template functionality for our News Producers.
Suffice to say there were hurdles and mistakes were made, and as we enter the second week of testing as I write this post there are undoubtedly a few more hurdles ahead. But also with every error that we rectify we draw satisfyingly closer to our end goal. Take this not as someone bemoaning the challenging nature of their work. But rather a problem solver celebrating the small victories already achieved in the overcoming of an alien graphics system, and aligning my own creative vision to the over-arching creative direction of the channel, while also looking ahead to the greater victory that is to come on launch day. I look forward to sharing the final outcomes with you here then… 31st March 2017, watch this space!