Project planning is about accurately assessing your available resources, and efficiently leveraging them for the best possible end result. The best producers are like puppet masters, pulling all the right strings, at the precise moment, often creating surprising results.

In partnership with Plymouth Area Community Television (PACTV), I was tasked with creating a new graphics package for an existing series called the Registrars Report. Monthly episodes of the series cover current news, as well as segments with special guests, or on historical events related to documents held by the county's oldest registry.

For this project, we did not have budget resources to create a custom graphics package, but what we did have, was unprecedented access to film inside the Registry, with the Registrar himself, John Buckley, as our knowledgeable guide.

With a tremendous amount of high quality footage now at our fingertips, it was Adobe's Motion Graphics Template engine to the rescue! I'm not ashamed to admit it. As much as they feel like a cop-out, and as stupid as the abbreviation for them sounds, there is definitely a time and a place for MoGrTs.

Beyond the budget issue, the producers of the Registrars Report needed a solution that could be implemented, on an episodic basis, by team members without chops or the time required to update complex graphics in After Effects. This requirement sealed the deal, and made the template solution a no-brainer.

With some thoughtful footage selection and typographic choices (along with a bit of advanced knowledge about the inner workings of MoGrTs), we had a repeatable solution, with a much higher production value than what we generally associate with what's cheaply or freely available on the template marketplaces.