_Anderson Cooper Full Circle
Bridging the worlds of linear tv, digital, and social media, the producers behind CNN’s Anderson Cooper 360 joined forces with CNN Digital to create Full Circle: a daily livestream with Anderson on Facebook Watch.
In an exclusive partnership with Facebook on their new on-demand platform, Full Circle gave us the opportunity to create real-time exchanges between Anderson and viewers. Audience polls and questions spur conversations and provide instant feedback, directly steering the trajectory of the show each day.
In an exclusive partnership with Facebook on their new on-demand platform, Full Circle gave us the opportunity to create real-time exchanges between Anderson and viewers. Audience polls and questions spur conversations and provide instant feedback, directly steering the trajectory of the show each day.
_The Process
_Season 1 Look Development_Season 2 Look Updates
_Season 3 Look Updates
Following an extensive initial branding direction, I worked in tandem with our Executive Creative Director, Jon Reyes, developing the visual language for the show. We built out both the digital graphics and the physical set design, transforming a preexisting newsroom that was not intended for use as a broadcast space.
We worked out how everything from segment bumpers, to tweets, to rugs and wall art would look and function. The familiar rules and considerations of traditional 16:9 linear television were inapplicable with a vertically oriented canvas, meaning that we had to reconceptualize how everything would fit together and still make editorial sense.
We also had to contend with seamlessly integrating live broadcast graphics templates (built and managed in Vizrt) with third party technology capturing the responses from the audience. Working very closely with the Vizrt and Vidpresso development teams, I oversaw the construction and deployment of templates for use by graphics and social media operators in the control room.
Finally, we also fleshed out new workflows and additional templates for newly formed cross-platform support teams of editors, producers, and designers responsible for the daily churn of content.
Show Facebook page: www.facebook.com/AndersonCooperFullCircle
Season 2
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Now living on CNN.com, and reformatted to 16:9, we wanted to leverage this new format, and continue to differentiate from Anderson’s linear show. Thus, we focused on a more social-media-feed feel, thinking more modularly about video, imagery, and text at a structural level, as opposed to the standard tv news over-the-shoulder graphics approach.
Bringing more context to the screen at once; images, tweets, quotes, etc. really supported this new tone, and with it, a lot of additional challenges that had to be worked out, both on a technical level in the control room as well as in terms of workflow with the editorial team.
Season 3
As everyone was adjusting to life in the age of covid and remote work, we faced new hurdles; how to present the show without everyone being in a control room together. we also wanted to refocus the show more on intimate one-on-one interviews. The result was a dramatically scaled back production workflow, that could be entirely managed via the cloud. Visually, we pulled from the visual languages of FaceTime, Zoom, Webex, etc. to A) have a direct, simple, and intimate interview format, and to B) keep our talent (Anderson) on-screen as much as possible, without feeling too much like the linear TV news standard of “talking heads in boxes”.
Executive Creative Director: Jon Reyes
Senior Motion Designer: Padraic Driscoll
Additional Animators: Curtis Brown, Michael Pisano, Jeff Hsu, Shane Csontos-Popko, Melody Shih, Sandy L.C. Pan, Lisa Kim
Host: Anderson Cooper
Executive Producer: Charlie Moore
Supervising Producers: Cullen Daly, Chuck Hadad
Line Producer: Kelly Daniel
Assistant Producers: Nora Neus, Kristina Callahan, Jeffrey Huang
Director: Gina Fellows
Technical Director: Shawn Strauss
Production Managers: Jason Holterhaus, Jonathan Tortora, Patricia Epstein
Vizrt Developers: Emily Lin, Paul Boyd, Jessica Hoehn, Daniel Kershner
Vidpresso Developer: Justin Carter
Additional Template Developers: Maya Dangerfield, Quentin Dunn
Camera Operators: Nick Godsell, Lesley Donelan
Social Media Executive Producer: Ashley Codianni
Social Media Director: Eric Weisbrod
Social Media Senior Producer: Josiah Ryan
Music: Pilotpriest - Archive Seven
