Very excited to be adding this one to my projects. I worked with the production team behind The Wrap Up to come up with their visual identity and working asset libraries. The Wrap Up is a weekly show recapping the top stories in the news in just about 5 minutes, hosted by CJ Pearson and produced in-house by the PragerU team. The key challenge to solve with this show was how to create a working product that could turn an episode around in less than a day with a skeleton team (only 4 people including CJ). It's so easy to make just another low-polish social media show but we also wanted this show to feel like a high-production value. For me, it was a chance to deliver on what I think is the ideal workflow for new shows at PragerU.

The motivation behind the show stemmed from our CEO, who like many are so busy with work they don't have the time to monitor the news or Twitter 24/7. We wanted to provide busy people with a quick look at the news so they can stay on top of it like they do every other part of their lives. This is something I totally identify with and think it's a great show concept. We started off with title exploration. In an unusual occurrence, I actually think that "NewsWrap," the first title we came up with, was perfect but we ended up exploring a few more and landed on "The Wrap Up." I still think it's a good title, but you can see here that some of the others also lent themselves to fun title treatments - including a throwback to blackletter mastheads.

Now it was time to move along to the major workflow challenge: what kind of working assets would lend themselves to a high-polish show that could also be filmed and cut all in one day by just one editor? The answer was to fully leverage motion graphics templates, so that there would be essentially no involvement from a designer in the episode-level execution. This was daunting because even though Motion Graphic Templates aren't really a new thing in design or editing, they are definitely not PragerU's bread and butter - yet! So how exciting was it to actually tackle a show's graphics from tip to tail ONLY using these assets? Super exciting that's how. I had a ton of fun brainstorming overlays with the producers and coordinating show segments with the deliverable assets. It's also satisfying to hand over a project to the editor and see a final output that is totally on-brand without feeling the need to drive from the back seat. It's the perfect blend of brand structure and creative flexibility that designers and editors need to interface with one another. I think that's really the appeal of these templates and what makes them so powerful.

The Wrap Up is literally just getting started, but it's already light years ahead of the model our other shows are running on. So I can't wait to see where it goes and work on more brand elements for it over the next year. CJ and the team are killing it, with even more shows on the way that hopefully I'll be able to highlight here in their own time!
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