CN Live
A large part of my role as the Senior Motion Graphics Designer at Contractor Nation is the planning and creation of assets for CN Live, the company's annual convention where dealers from all across the network are invited to Hartford, Connecticut for a three day summit.
As Senior Motion Graphics Designer, I am in charge of taking the initial design work that the graphics team has done and translating that into animation, creating the generic motion graphics package for this year as well as working on several more specified videos, and strategically delegating the work between myself and the Junior Motion Graphics Designer.
One of the largest projects with each convention are the awards videos that are played throughout Friday night's awards dinner, crowning the best performing companies in each division. I design most videos played in the main ballroom to span the main screen as well as the 2 smaller screens to the sides of it.
There are awards videos for each of the 8 divisions that range from having five to even fifty entries per video, so organization, solid templatization, and efficient workflow are key in producing these videos. As a template that is going to be used in so many videos all in one night, it's important to make it dynamic and interesting for the viewers. In pursuit of that, this year I took photos of various products that each division uses, including them throughout the videos as nods to the hard work that the contractors do.
Every CN Live begins with an energetic opening video to get the crowd hyped up, and 2023 was no different. That year's opening video was set to a song, and so I was tasked with creating motion graphics to highlight a few of the lyrics. I came up with the gritty style for these lyric highlights, and worked on this section of the video.
On Saturday morning of the convention, the dealers are driven in buses from the convention center in Hartford to the Contractor Nation campus in Seymour, and so I came up with the idea to make a 3D animated tour of the campus to be played on the buses.
This animation's goal is to be informative, using minimalistic 3D models to simplify the campus and make it easy to learn the layout, with a motion graphics overlay to tie the video together and show the specific rooms in which classes will be held.
And finally, below is both a look at the countdown timer that I created for the ballroom at the convention center in 2023, as well as an example of how my generic motion graphics package was utilized for a video highlighting dealers across the network that same year.
