Season 2 Production Info:
Identified and reported all product placement for every episode. Audited cuts in post-production for character use-case and Apple UI accuracy across all product OS under my Graphics Supervisor. Animated VFX UI prototypes and templates for devices on set, and for post-production usage.
Production Challenges:
- Production assistant leaving during ongoing release of Season 2.
- Previous vendor not matching the animated VFX graphic they provided to the shape of the device.
- Production company not following Apple device guidelines.
Production Solutions:
With the previous production assistant leaving during the ongoing weekly release of Season 2 I worked together with my Graphics Supervisor to assemble the cuts that needed to be revised from the cut log. From there I would follow up with QC notes and provide animated assets according to the scripted action for the new production assistant that would be hired on. An example of this was the notch-less iPhone 12 used by Rebecca’s mother. The previous vendor had created an animation that did not have a notch cut out for the iPhone 12. That Friday when the episode released an “iPhone 13 with no notch” was trending on Twitter having people believe that the next iPhone would have a fullscreen display with no notch. This caused my team and I to fix the problem that we were left with resulting with a patch of the episode with a new animated graphic including the cutout for the notch. Solutions stemmed from the quickest and effective way to create the animation (rotoscoping the top of the graphic to create a notch, motion tracking an asset on top of the previous graphic, or recreating the entire graphic animation from scratch).
Another example was a cracked iPhone surrounded by blood from Sharon getting in an accident. It is against Apple guidelines to have a device cracked or be surrounded by blood. My team went back and forth with the Ted Lasso team to ensure this mistake would not happen again as the season continued and for future seasons to come by educating their team on device policy guidelines post-script.
Product Placement Info:
- Incoming and outgoing iMessages.
- Incoming and outgoing phone calls.
- Incoming and outgoing FaceTime calls.
- Safari web browser.
- Camera app.
- Photos app.
- Incoming notifications on Home and Lock Screen.
Software Used:
- Adobe After Effects
- Adobe Illustrator
- Adobe Photoshop
- Adobe Sketch
- Box
- Excel
- Keynote
- Numbers
- ProtoPie