DDR4LLS Charity Marathon Series

Graphic Design, Broadcast Production

Early in 2014, my friend Carl Valencia began raising funds on behalf of the Leukemia and Lymphoma Society (LLS) and their Team in Training program. He spoke with mutual friend Jeff Lloyd -- then a broke college student with nothing to give but his talent as a passionate dance game enthusiast -- and the two of them gave birth to the idea of a charity broadcast.

The idea was that Jeff would play up to 16 hours of the popular arcade video game DanceDanceRevolution in a bid to convince people to donate funds to the LLS. In the style of the popular Desert Bus for Charity event, people watching the broadcast would have to donate a certain amount of money to increase the time Jeff would have to play, and the amount needed to increase the play time would increase every time a milestone was reached. I was tapped by Jeff and Carl to do the graphics for the event. Over the course of the week prior to the stream, I got my hands on the open-source Open Broadcaster Software (OBS) and learned its intricacies in the span of a week, then put that knowledge to use creating multiple-camera setups with arbitrary text input for requests, a live timer, and a donation total. During the broadcast, I joined forces with Carl, providing relevant commentary to the viewers and helping out with a couple of challenges. In total, we raised about $16,000 for blood cancer research.

In October of 2015, we did the stream again, and having more knowledge of After Effects, I aimed to pump up the production quality of the stream by creating a trailer (shown above) and introducing animated overlays, which OBS supports. Unfortunately, due to a lack of time and hardware issues, we were unable to use those assets, opting instead to use the backup static assets that I had made just in case. We raised approximately $5,600 over the course of 12 hours.