[courtesy of alt.obituaries] February 18, 2009 Ben Blank, Innovator of Graphics for TV News, Dies at 87 By STEVEN HELLER
Ben Blank, who as graphics director for CBS and later ABC television news introduced the concept of using logolike images behind anchors as signatures for major news coverage, died on Feb. 3 at his home in Teaneck, N.J. He was 87. The cause was complications of a stroke suffered three years ago, said his daughter Karen Blank. Mr. Blank invented novel ways of presenting on-air visual information, illustration and symbols, and in so doing helped transform the appearance and content of network evening news. "He was, indeed, a pioneer of television graphics at a time when his artistry and genius were all we had to demonstrate a complicated story," the former CBS anchor Walter Cronkite said in an e-mail message reported on NorthJersey.com. For most of the 1950s, television news broadcasts, in black and white, were visually austere. Anchors sat at small desks with a simple clock or map hanging on the wall behind them; often the name of a sponsor was displayed in front. Mr. Blank, a cartoonist for four years in the Air Force who was hired by CBS as a graphic designer in 1953, believed that to pique and retain the viewer's interest, it was necessary to provide a visual mnemonic that would serve as a logo for the story. This was especially useful when a photograph or film was difficult to obtain on deadline. The image, known in TV news-speak as the "over-the-shoulder" graphic, could be repeated as needed to show narrative continuity from day to day. Mr. Blank also called it the "think-quick visual." His big break at CBS came in 1956, when he was asked to illustrate the collision of two ships, the Andrea Doria and the Stockholm, off the coast of Nantucket, Mass. Another early image, for a story on segregation, was the silhouette of a house, half black and half white. To illustrate the buildup in the Vietnam War before American involvement, he drew a map and then had it set afire on camera to show the intensity of the fighting, an image he chose because "most people are very weak on geography," he said in a 1963 article in The New York Times. When the launch of the first Sputnik satellite took Americans by surprise, in 1957, Mr. Blank created what is believed to be the first electronic animation by repeating camera shots of a rotating golf ball, which represented Sputnik, on the end of some coat-hanger wire; the wire was attached to a small rotating globe. For added effect he glued glittering stars to the black background. For two decades, before the existence of the Quantel Paintbox, a high-tech computer tool for rendering graphics, Mr. Blank did all his work by hand, using materials like cardboard and glue. When the Mercury astronaut L. Gordon Cooper set down in the Pacific, far from any cameras, Mr. Blank used a small-scale model of the space capsule from the office of ABC's science editor, Jules Bergman, and floated it in a janitor's water bucket. To animate this makeshift display, he had a stagehand jiggle the pail as the camera moved in close, illustrating the astronaut's risky situation. Mr. Blank was born in San Francisco and as a child moved with his family to Union City, N.J. He worked in his father's grocery, where he taught himself to draw. Before and after serving in the Army Air Forces during World War II, he studied at the Cooper Union in New York. In 1962 he left CBS for ABC, where he remained as graphics director until retiring in 1992. There he developed graphic formats still used today. His last major logo was for coverage of Operation Desert Storm. In 1986 he was the co-author, with Mario R. Garcia, of "Professional Video Graphic Design," which became the standard text for anyone interested in broadcast graphics. In addition to his daughter Karen, of West Hartford, Conn., he is survived by his wife of 60 years, Miriam, known as Miki; a son, Edward, of Teaneck; another daughter, Jody Cook of River Vale, N.J.; and four grandchildren. Mr. Blank once recalled that the NASA mission to the Moon was a wellspring of news-graphics creativity. What he called animations were elaborate fake spaceships and real actors on tethers simulating astronauts in zero gravity. Because of this and other studio mockups, he was once asked by the broadcast journalist John Hockenberry in a 1996 I.D. magazine article about the tabloid claims that the space program was just a hoax filmed on a movie lot. Mr. Blank answered: "You know, we could have done it all with graphics. All they had to do was ask." Copyright 2009 The New York Times Company --~--~---------~--~----~------------~-------~--~----~ You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups "World News Now Discussion List" group. To post to this group, send email to [email protected] To unsubscribe from this group, send email to [email protected] For more options, visit this group at http://groups.google.com/group/wnndl?hl=en -~----------~----~----~----~------~----~------~--~---
