Cash Course is PragerU Kids's financial literacy show aiming to teach basic monetary skills to everyone from elementary to high school students. It's a very important show because, frankly-speaking, these things are not taught in schools very often. Never mind that these skills can make or break your life course.

Background

Let's just not make it all green ok? That was my primary worry when we came up with the idea of Cash Course. After several hours - or maybe it was days - of researching the existing gamut of financial literacy shows on YouTube and elsewhere, it was obvious that there was an established look for these shows. Boring, slow, whiteboard presentations... and green. So it was pretty simple in my opinion. We just needed to not repeat that trend. There was only one show that I thought hit the mark in terms of young appeal, which was Netflix Explained. Even though almost every episode of that show is promoting woke nonsense, the presentation style is undeniably good. We took that for inspiration on Cash Course's visual style.

Style

Since this was a kids show I figured right away that it would need to be vibrant, with a lot of colors, textures and patterns. I also thought the tone of the animation would need to be like a moving collage that blended vector graphics with photographic assets. A good example of this is the mountain animation shown on this page. My biggest concern was the explanatory diagrams that would be necessary to give visual aid to financial concepts. One of the things I stressed was that we had to show the math in action, not just explain it next to a static chart. Money moves in real life, so it should move in our lessons.

Naming the Show

So we actually had a lot of good title options for this show which was really fun for me. Other options that I liked included $O$, Learn It to Earn It, Our lead animator for PragerU Kids, Dan, jumped in to assist with rendering a bunch of them. That was super helpful too since I was in the middle of 4 simultaneous show developments. But Dan was not only able to add his own unique renders to the titles, he also did an amazing job converting my black and white sketches to full color concepts. Maybe it's a symptom of teamwork, but the final title design was actually an amalgam of my title idea "Cash Course," Dan's revised take on my initial title sketch for that, my additional refinements to his render and then finally a bit of animation that I did for the title sequence. So all around it's one of the more satisfying show title's I've been involved in creating.

The Run of Show

We had decided pretty early on in 2022 that the show would have 3 distinct segments. There would be animated segments for illustrating narrative, presentation or diagrammatic sections for explaining financial concepts, and then live-action segments for additional context and a bit of humor. If the show was successful, we discussed even introducing interview sections with financial experts. The live action segments are especially fun - a lot of PragerU staff got opportunities to act and it turned out people had a bunch of hidden on-camera talent.

Check out more of Cash Course at PragerU.com