Motion Graphics, Project Management
The SHED, or Student Hall for Exploration and Development, is RIT’s newest makerspace, performing arts venue, and classroom addition to the campus. This is the story of how I became a content designer for the SHED jumbotron, from the initial planning to its growth over the year into an elaborate broadcast of all things RIT.
Prompt
My teammate said, “It should look like Times square!” We were being entrusted with the centerpiece of a shiny new student hub on campus, so how could we use it to promote all that RIT has to offer?
Solution
By fostering connection and trust with collaborators, we were able to serve our community by making the jumbotron a premiere information hub.
There were many designs that my teammates Max and Ash directly worked on. They and my supervisor, MAGIC Director David Long, gave lots of helpful feedback. But I’ll be showcasing what I was primarily assigned to!
Sizzlin' it Up
The following two videos contain sizzle reels to showcase academics, performing arts and campus life (with some extra mograph clips at the end). We formed a distinct style with our use of shapes, gradients, and motion curves, while still synergizing with the parent RIT brand. I created most of the shape and text animations, which are all templatized so they can be used in various ways.
Leading the Summer Squad
I took up the mantle of team lead as Max, the previous lead, left the team. I brought on a new teammate, Ash, and we set out to keep making cool content. This is where I learned that Max had not actually had it easier than me—wrangling collaborators over email and organizing the Notion takes brainpower! I dedicated myself to improving my organization and communication skills.
See? I documented everything.
Telling Everyone's Stories
We spent much of our time hunting down leads for stories new and old, whether that was highlighting student work or adapting a magazine article into a bite-sized shortform video. I even created my own version of RIT’s tiger mascot and used him in various healthy habits videos, the assets and writing of which were all mine. It felt good to help others, but also have the chance to express myself, too.
In the beginning, there were off-brand colors.
For my first week on the job, we went wild and created an entire pitch with original colors, shapes and fonts that, while cool, weren't really on-brand. At all. Looking back, I'm glad Marketing & Communications forced us to get creative within the guidelines. Still, some of the ideas formed during this initial phase carried through, like the heavy use of gradients.
Becoming the Brand Champion I was meant to be!!
The RIT brand portal opens with President David Munson asking us to "Be a Brand Champion." Now, anyone with my broken, absurdist sense of humor knows that this is the funniest thing around. But with some degree of seriousness, we've grown very accustomed to working with the selection of colors and shapes RIT provides. I'm thankful that our school's brand is a lot less stuffy and drab than others.
2024: New ways to display
At the start, I conducted a survey that helped us gain insight to the viewing habits, likes, and dislikes of the community. And from that, we changed our strategy.
The SHED Team and our main stakeholders decided on having two reels that balance the screen’s use as a billboard, and its use as a showcase for RIT projects. We also revamped our advertisement strategy. Overall, we are starting to take more of a broadcast TV sort of approach that should boost engagement.
Daytime Reel
Shortform Content
Sizzle reels
More frequent ads for RIT events
Nighttime Reel
Longform content
Student projects such as films
Documentaries
This is part of the Pixera interface. The program (and media server) is usually used for large spaces like concert venues, and operated by people way more knowledgable than I am. I had to swallow my pride and ask for help on the dumbest of things, but we cobbled together some timelines and programmed them to run at certain times.
Oh boy, I sure do love nodes and pretending to know how to code in Lua!