Because China Season 3 won a People’s Voice Webby award. This series combines the best of unusual, thorough reporting and excellent production. My role within the team was to creative direct the look and feel for the show, as well as build templates and manage animation freelancers.
The art direction changed a bit from season 1 to its final iteration, becoming cleaner and sleeker. I changed the colors from being technicolor inspired to a more modern interpretation using chromatic aberration and neon glows. The backgrounds changed from subtle, constantly moving paper textures to flat grays.
You can watch a full episode below, and the full series (paywalled) here.
The LUT on the non animated portions also changed. The dramatic blue look became a little softer, less contrasty, and more pastel. I completed most of the animation for this series, but occasionally worked with freelancers to complete episodes when I was on other projects. My favorite parts of the Because China style are the glitch transitions, bright color palette, and the desktop-inspired Skype treatments.
Transitions were a mixture of aggressively stylized wave warp and AE pixelsorter to create modern glitch effects.
It was not always feasible to travel to different countries meet experts, so I created custom Skype treatments that consisted of a neon desktop system that incorporated lower 3rds and easter eggs for the desktop icons. The hard drive is named the country that the expert is skyping from, and has a semi-transparent flag emblazoned on top. Underneath that is a folder named for the episode number, and below that a folder with title of the speaker.
I had a ton of fun adding these details in and creating all of the iOS icon dupes.
