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PATRIOT ACT WITH HASAN MINHAJ
Design Director/Episode Lead for Cycles 5 & 6
As the Design Director/Episode Lead for Patriot Act with Hasan Minhaj Cycles 5 & 6, I was able to merge my passions for design, storytelling, and current events — a humbling position especially during the height of “fake news”.
My responsibilities started with analyzing scripts to develop, storyboard, design, and animate custom backgrounds and graphics. I also collaborated intensively with other departments (writers, news, archival, etc) while pitching concepts, building presentations, revising & adapting ideas to story/joke changes (sometimes minutes before show time!), on top of directing our graphics team to ensure the animation lent the best visual experience to compliment both the writing and Hasan’s performance.
CYCLE 5 continued the show’s established style: an immersive stage show with a live audience.
CYCLE 6 moved into quarantine just after taping the first episode. This meant adapting the show’s entire graphic language — built for an irregularly-shaped stage with 8K screens — to a conventional green-screen set up in Hasan’s house
Below, you will find collections of clips from the final taped performance, stills of the final designs, progress imagery, and work that ended up on the cutting room floor from episodes I either Art Directed or those to which I made significant contributions.
▼LEGAL MARIJUANA IS RIGGED/
Original concepts and designs for the stage version of the Marijuana episode. The first two images were part of our proof of concept on how we could elevate the design language of the show for the new cycle. The goal was to play up the materiality of photo-collaged elements by pushing the color system beyond the tried-and-true tritone tint effect. This was such a fun episode to use as a testing ground for that. By the time Marijuana was due to film, we were in the quarantine format, so these designs would eventually be adapted by John Koltai.
EARLY COLOR STUDIES FOR THE WARM VERSION AND COOL VERSION BACKGROUNDS OF THE EPISDOE
FINAL INTRODUCTORY SCENE BACKGROUND DESIGN
ALTERNATE BACKGROUND DESIGN
▼WHY DOING TAXES IS SO HARD/
“Taxes” was the first episode shot in Cycle 6; the very next day, we packed up the studio to work from home in quarantine. The stage graphics were later reconfigured for the quarantine format, and also to cater to a script that had been revised to address a very different world. I’m still proud of how great this episode looked on the stage (yellows are notoriously tricky!), so those images and gifs are shared here alongside their updated counterparts.
▼HOW WE BROKE OUR OWN SUPPLY CHAINS: COVID19/
It was not often that Patriot Act tackled a subject matter that was so “of the moment.” Made between April and May 2020, the topics of the episode — as well as the designs and animation — were constantly in flux as we learned in real time about Covid and its effects on our world. Working on an episode about broken supply chains amid a pandemic while still figuring out our own quarantine work-flow was a surreal, once-in-a-lifetime experience.
▼WHAT HAPPENS IF I CAN’T PAY RENT?/
Our first episode started and finished in quarantine, “Evictions” was a testing ground to figure out how were were going to adapt the design language: how we would balance the density of background/text/animation/jokes; how to position the graphics so as to not compete with Hasan and his performance; how to keep the snappy pace without multiple camera angles; and how to display the necessary, factual information with less screen real-estate than we were accustomed to.
STYLE EXPERIMENT REJECTS FOR THE NEW QUARANTINE DESIGN SYSTEM
▼THE NEWS INDUSTRY IS BEING DESTROYED
This color study and concept exploration, taken from the very earliest days of Cycle 6, explores how ambient type and color could be used in the season’s designs.
▼IS COLLEGE STILL WORTH IT?/
▼MENTAL HEALTH/
The American mental health system is bonkers. To represent this in our backgrounds, I decided to deviate from the show’s normally slick collages by using double exposure to create moments that were more ambiguous and shadowy. M.C. Escher was also a big inspiration as a visual metaphor for the convoluted path to get help. Even though this was my first episode (Cycle 5), the massive “firework” (shop-talk for a larger sequential graphic moment in an episode) at the end of the episode is a personal highlight from my Patriot Act experience.
▼WHY WE CAN’T RETIRE/
“Aging” was my last episode in Cycle 5. Although it had one of my favorite color stories from any episode, the subject matter was the most visually challenging — how do we depict topics of aging without making a series of cliche pharmaceutical advertisements? On the other hand, it is a treat to be able to turn a stage into a game show set and a giant tidal wave, and here we were able to do both!
▼THE UGLY TRUTH OF FAST FASHION/
● BEHIND THE SCENES/
View from my station in the control room. Wednesday rehearsals and Thursday show days were spent here going over every angle of the show (quite literally!) while relaying notes/changes between the production team in the control room, Hasan on the stage, and the graphics team cranking out all of animation upstairs.
The Patriot Act Graphics Team: Pup Edition
◼︎CREDITS/
Creative Director・Jorge Peschiera
Graphics Producer・Justine Webster
Design Director/Episode Lead・Sarah Orenstein
Design Director/Episode Lead・Yussef Cole
Lead Animators・Paris London Glickman, Richard Lampasone & Brandon Sugiyama
Animators・Apollo Baldoz, Ananya Ghatrazu, Maddy Hodgetts, Jeejung Kim, Ryan Mauskopf, John Hughes Alex Pope & Tanner Scarr
Assistant Editor・Liv Senghor
Stage Direction・Richard Preuss & Shannon Hartman (Why We Can’t Retire)
Senior Archival Producer・Katheryn Lord
Archival Producers・Farrah Lopez, David Sokoler, Rachel Moss, Geraldyne Wee & Noah Weitzman
Previsualization & Screens Supervisor・Jaimie Van Dyke
GFX Coordinator・Riaan Weyers & Megan Sweet
Pre-Visualization Operator・Mikaela Baird & Taylor Lilly
GRAPHICS TEAM/CYCLE 5
◼︎CREDITS/
Creative Director・Yussef Cole
Director of Graphics Production・Justine Webster
Design Director/Episode Lead・Sarah Orenstein
Design Director/Episode Lead・John Koltai
Lead Animators・Richard Lampasone, Olga Povarchuk, Adam Saul & Jenni Yiu-Chen Yang
Animators・Apollo Baldoz, Dorca Musseb, Maddy Hodgetts, John Hughes, Jeejung Kim, Ryan Mauskopf & Ananya Ghatrazu
Assistant Editor・Liv Senghor
Stage Direction・Richard Preuss
Supervising Archival Producer・Kathryn Lord
Senior Archival Producers・Farrah Lopez, David Sokoler & Noah Weitzman
Archival Producr・Rachel Moss
Archival Coordinator・Anusska Dhar
Archival Associate Producer・Megan Sweet
Screens Producer・Jaimie Van Dyke
Pre-Visualization Operator・Mikaela Baird