NBA All-Star 2020
Client: NBA, Turner Sports Studio: WarnerMedia Studios Role: Motion Designer, Technical Artist Year: 2020
At WarnerMedia Studios I worked on both the NBA All-Star Draft Show and the All-Star Game itself, putting automation and JavaScript to work on real broadcast deadlines.
Draft Show Interstitials
In broadcast, the hard part isn’t one great design; it’s turning out many versions of a deliverable fast. The Draft Show was my first automation setup, driven by player photos, two-line player names and team logos.
Every setup starts with a spreadsheet to organize the data and variables. It’s the most important step, and a year of spreadsheets in the Singapore army paid off here.
Expressions then let each comp pull the right logo from a text layer’s source text, fed by the spreadsheet (see my tutorial, Selecting Images with a Text Layer using Expressions). Finally, a script I wrote duplicates the selected comp, swaps the source text, renames the comp and repeats for every row.
Dataset
Versioned Team & Event Deliverables
All-Star Game Interstitials
The All-Star Game reused the same setup with few changes. One snag: some teams’ blue hex codes went too dark under the tint overlays on footage.
A Google Sheets script by wjmazza, forked from Pathoschild, added a color preview to each cell, so I could spot the dark blues and pick more visible ones.
Dataset
Versioned Team & Event Deliverables
Credits
Direction
Design & Animation