Coming Home, airing on Lifetime and produced by RelativityReal, is Greasy Pig Studios’ first gig creating an entire season of television’s worth of graphics. Featuring surprise homecomings of American service-members from their tours of duty, the show spends equal time on the soldier and their family as well as the elaborate surprises they, along with host Matt Rogers, cook up.

The graphics for the show are unsurprisingly strongly patriotic. The main titles focus on the reunions themselves, with a snapshot motif that recalls the famous “V-J-Day in Times Square” photo by Alfred Eisenstadt (honestly I can’t remember anymore how conscious of a reference this was).

The titles went through multiple concepts; before GPS received show footage, the first pass involved stylized 3d graphics of a helicopter leaving an aircraft carrier for shore, and then a humvee driving through terrain to settle on a picket-fence house.  The second concept involved a combination of show footage and B-Roll, and resembled a TV commercial for the various arms of the military: futuristic, flashy, with lots of flashcuts.

Finally, as we honed in on the reunions themselves (as well as the sequence being cut from 60 seconds, to 30 seconds, to a mere 15 seconds), a more organic approach led us to the final approved concept.

Meanwhile, the segment intros retained the futuristic military technological aesthetic, which served as “mission briefings” to lead us into the various segments within an episode, giving the segment a name as well as showing on a map the mission’s location.

This series is one of the highest points in Greasy Pig Studios’ history so far, and we’d jump at the chance to work on subsequent seasons (which seem to be underway, given the enormous success of the first season).