Many broadcast students at WIU like to add to their expertise their ability to compose computer-generated graphics and animation for television. The Department of Communication - Broadcasting currently supplies one course, Television Graphics to help you learn the concepts and applications of computer graphics and animation for television. Anchor boxes are graphic representations of news stories and are an integral part of any newscast. The box is normally keyed in over the news anchor's shoulder while reading a news story. Students learn to use Adobe photocopy to design multi-layered stills and then import them into PowerPoint as a means to display them during the newscast.
Students design both generic and story-specific stills.
Story-specific stills are designed for a specific news story on the day of broadcast. Computer Animation Students in the TV Graphics class also learn to generate true 3-dimensional computer animation's. The animation's can be of any length, but need to serve some sort of purpose such as program introductions, segues, or tell a story. Sometimes you may need a 3-D object that is not available from the object library. There are even Internet sites that have free downloads of many interesting objects made by fellow Toaster folks.