Issue link: https://digital.copcomm.com/i/1469942
As things continued to progress, we added a full- time staff of coordinators, graphic artists, and coders. In 2018, when we were asked to supervise video for The Morning Show and For All Mankind for Apple's new streaming service, we knew that we would need even more help and approached another old friend, Matt Brucell, who had recently won his third Emmy Award for broadcast graphic design while he was at ESPN. Matt had been the playback department PA on The Hulk when I was a Graphics Coordinator, and he and I had stayed in touch in the years since, even after he moved to broadcast television graphic design. We knew The Morning Show was going to need a lot of realistic broadcast graphics, and that Matt had the proper background to understand the specic needs of playback. Matt joined Local 695 as a Playback Specialist and Modern Motion Pictures as our third partner. The Morning Show, much like The Newsroom, was massively complicated to get off the ground. We leaned heavily on the mad skills of Playback Engineers Justin Edgerly and Justin White, and the close coordination with Sound Mixer Bill Kaplan and Utility (and "Master of Comms") Tommy Giordano, as well as dozens of other video and sound professions each season. As our company continued to expand, we began to look for ways to streamline our on-set workows. For example, many Playback Operators use off- the-shelf tools such as Keynote or ProtoPie for creating and cueing phone graphics during a scene. However, we found that both of these programs had serious limitations, both in their capabilities and the time it took to program and design individual graphics. A custom solution was needed by 2020. Chris Cundey had already spent several years developing our proprietary programs, Magic Phone and Scene Builder. This allowed us to effortlessly recreate common smartphone actions so that they could be easily cued in an on-set environment. With these two applications, we could create simple phone calls and texting gags in just a few minutes. Even more complicated actions, like Video Supervisor Chris Cundey (back, center-right) with cast and crew on the set of HBO's Silicon Valley