Around The Industry

“Around The Industry” was my senior project in college, and something I remain proud of to this day.

This was produced for a “Studio Broadcast” class that brought together students from Film & Video and VFX/Motion Graphics. The class was actually two different classes, as soon to be graduating upperclassman would work with newer students to produce a live-recorded video utilizing our school’s production studio. At the time, as one of the more experienced seniors, despite anticipating spending the semester huddled away in a dark corner building CG elements, I was selected to instead serve as Producer for the class. It wasn’t a position I was expecting to be in at all, but ultimately I was extremely satisfied with, especially due to the amount of direct interactions I had with multiple teams to help solve a wide variety of problems, most of which were completely new to me, so I was constantly learning something new. Not to mention, in the end being uniquely satisfied creatively with our results.

The class was an experiential challenge as students ranged from being Freshman with little-to-no experience (But tons of enthusiasm!) to Seniors that wanted to do as little as possible in order to have more time to polish their Demo Reels- so a very interesting dynamic to say the least! However, our biggest challenge I felt was one of redundancy and indifference. Traditionally, the class had always been a mock newsroom with students playing the roles of anchors, doing the weather, sports highlights, etc. Like a diluted mix of “Anchorman” and every high school bulletin announcement, only not funny or informative. Everyone pretty much had the same “blow-off” expectations, which I was afraid would result in an altogether forgettable final product.

A major concept I had become interested in as a student was designing with sustainability in mind. Despite some students already having fake wigs and mustaches picked out,
I pitched a more concept that would still meet our class’ prerequisites, while also engaging current students, as well as those that would come after us. I suggested challenging ourselves to do something more “serious” that could still be fun to work on- and watch. I suggested pivoting to an interview based show where the class would have to reach out to professional “creatives”, in order to both help acquaint students with seeking out mentors, as well as expanding their networks by reaching out to professionals from a more diversified field than they might be used to.
The show could then be a “social-ready”, easily digestible (as in 1 host and 1 guest in 10 minutes or less) Q&A session with a new student host every episode interviewing a creative from a field not related to what they were pursuing. The reason for this was to help expand students’ prospects of what sort of work they might be doing in the future, especially as students were preparing to enter an incredibly fluid but potentially rough economical landscape. Keeping sustainability in mind, we designed the show’s structure to be as “turn-key” as possible,including building the primary set to be modular, monochromatic & minimal so that future “seasons” could re-use our existing set pieces with a simple paint over or “skin” to differentiate themselves from previous iterations of the show.

The class reacted very positively to the idea, and we got to work researching, scheduling and writing.

Over the course of sixteen weeks, our crew of 20 odd students broke into separate teams of 3-5 people, with each team being ultimately responsible for a different arm of “pre” and “post” production including: producing/communications/scheduling, set design/lighting, camera operators/switching/audio capture, graphics, and editing/finishing. Each team would also be responsible for producing their own interview segments, all under the collective banner of “Around The Industry.” Final segments were shown throughout campus during school hours, and were much utilized by the admissions department as a recruitment tool.

As a VFX/Motion Graphics student, I was also assigned to our show’s “graphics” team whose responsibilities for the show included all elements for the intro, lower thirds, and end credits. We were all anticipating putting together a slick and modern animation, and were debating a few concepts that ranged from text-heavy stop-motion-like After Effects animations, to flying around the inside mechanisms of different cameras throughout history. While we were still working on our concepts, I had been listening to an interview with David Lynch where he talked about the origins of creativity, and how he believes it’s an extension of facing one’s fears. It made me pause and reflect on what I was afraid of creatively due to inexperience. So, in the same spirit as what we had done with the show’s overall concept, we decided it was time to challenge ourselves and design a live action intro. The idea was relatively simple- we would watch firsthand as a hazy dreamlike environment would reveal an archetypal craftsman designing and building what would end up being the show’s logo. I threw together a rough pitch-deck/storyboard and despite everyone wondering why the “graphics kids” were doing night shoots, we created our shows intro by facing our fears.

The final show opening ended up getting condensed down to a :30 version and further split into separate intro and credit segments to allow for more emphasis on the interview segments.

Below is the "director's cut" if you will, which was selected by faculty and industry judges as a featured project in our 14th annual ARTimation student showcase.

Producer, Storyboard, Design, Direction- Erich Randall
Camera Operators- Devin Lee Hayes, Daniel Haynes, Matt Million
Animation- Daniel Haynes

ABOVE: Early logo development. The show was originally set to be "ASK THE INDUSTRY".
Changing it to be "AROUND" was my solution to the hangup of how each interviewer would sign off each segment in a consistent manner, while still retaining the "AI" initials.

Logo Design Concepts- Erich Randall

BELOW: Having worked together previously, my graphics squad were all in on my pitch for the intro, but convincing the rest of our team required some selling as to how and why I was planning a live action shoot. I put together a pitch-deck that proved invaluably helpful during our intense night shoot.  

Storyboard/Pitch Deck- Erich Randall

SHOWTIME!

The annual Studio Broadcast class brought together digital film and visual effects students to produce bi-weekly live "broadcasts" of interviews with a wide variety variety of designers, artists, actors, and engineers. For our live segment, I got a unique chance to step away from producing/directing and put myself on the other side of the camera for a change as I was joined by up-and-coming Chicago based SFX artist Brian Zurek. In our candid interview, Brian talks about how he became a make-up artist, different styles of SFX work, using makeup to develop and strengthen a story- all while shredding a model's face!


See more of Brian's work HERE.