Compact History
Project Overview
A New York Emmy® is the broadcast industry's acknowledgment that the work landed. For Compact History, that means the motion graphics succeeded at the hardest possible brief: make history feel urgent and alive for 4th–8th graders who have every other option available to them.
The series is a PBS Digital Series built for digital-first audiences — kinetic enough to hold attention, clear enough to serve the education. Logo builds, full-screen animations, and segment transitions all had to earn their place in every frame.
Built in After Effects with Premiere Pro broadcast delivery.
What I Built
The full package: animated logo builds establishing the series identity, full-screen segment animations making historical moments visceral and immediate, transition systems for moving between timelines with energy, and a portal effect built from layered composites — a signature visual device for the series.
The Emmy reflects what the motion was built to do. The clips below show how it was built.
Motion Clips
Logo Animation
The series identity in motion — the logo build that opens every episode.
Bone Wars
Full-screen segment animation — historical drama made kinetic for a digital audience.
Smoke Ring Portal
Transition animation — a visual device for moving between historical moments with energy.
Building the Portal
The portal effect is the series' signature transition — a visual device for pulling the viewer through time. These clips show the system in construction: the finished effect, the individual layer tests that built it, and the composite backplate that holds the host, the watchface, and the portal together in a single frame.
Portal Effect
The finished transition — a smoke ring portal pulling the viewer through a historical timeline.
Smoke Ring Layer Test
Individual layers isolated — the mosaic composite elements that build the portal from the inside out.
Backplate Composite
The full environment — host, watchface, and portal effect composited into a single frame.