Anderson Cooper
Category
Digital Series
Client
CNN
Branding package and production for Anderson Cooper's Full Circle live digital series.
Credits
Executive Creative Director
Jon Reyes
Art Director
Paddy Driscoll
Senior Motion Graphics Producers
Curtis Brown, Michael Pisano
Additional Animation
Quinn Qian, Jeff Hsu, Shane Csontos-Popko, Melody Shih, Sandy L.C. Pan, Lisa Kim
Info.
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.
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”.
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
