DVD Menu Moodboard

A little late on the blog but here it is, the moodboard, as you can see the pictures within the moodboard are grainy and faded with a few vibrant colours, the faded colours are mostly blue and the vibrant ones are reds and oranges (the muzzle flashes and the 'misfits' orange jumpsuits for example) the genres of the film/television shown in this moodboard are a blend between cult, drama and thriller. The themes are strongly based around drug use, sex and violence. My favorite colours to use when it comes to this genre are the faded blue's, because they seem to work very well when it comes to cinematography and animation, i also use  a few vibrant colours to contrast with them such as red (often when we use fake blood) and an odd item of clothing which stands out from the rest. Sin City use this effect to the  max by making the images all in black and white apart from the colour red. The reason i made a moodboard is to creat an image of all the styles of font and colour pallettes that are currently fashionalble within the genre. I made this one differently to my previous one, this was made entirely in photoshop by taking images from the web as opposed ot tearing images from magazines etc.

Encore

I started using encore a little while before this course, but not enough to go through this task smoothly, so i researched online for some tutorials and i found this great one by Andrew Kramer on videocopilot.net

http://www.videocopilot.net/tutorials/dvd_authoring/

It not only tells you how to make the buttons etc, but it also tells you how to make loops for the menu and how to incorporate animation from Adobe After Effects, coincidentally, Andrew Kramer also gives many tuorials on After Effects and he has taught me nearly every thing i know on animation.

Finishing the DVD menu...

I had been working on my dvd through Adobe Effects and Photoshop, here are some screen shots of my progress:

Fig 1: (Adobe After Effects CS3) As you can see at this point there are only 4 layers in the timeline, the back ground image, the black layer with a radial ramp effect and the multiply blending mode, the title 'split' and a camera layer. The camera layer is what's used to navigate in a 3D space, all of the layers are 3D apart from the ramp effected layer which is used as a frame for the menu. The white box's on the image are title and action safe guide lines because depending on which television being used, if thhe titles are always kept withing these guidelines, they will always be visable)

Fig 2: (Edited in Adobe Photoshop CS3) I have used this programe to cut this image quicly to be able to be imported into photoshop, i had some trouble keeping the transaperency effect used in PS when i imported the saved file to AE, so i decided to use my innitiative and put a green layer behind my image so that i could later colour key it in after effects.

Fig 3: (After Effects) This screen shot simply shows that i have added the play buttons etc and a silver boarder with a heavy feather so the layers blend well together

Fig 4: (After Effects) This image shows the end of the image animation with all the buttons and the title in place, i have clicked them all so that you can see that the are 3D (The x, y and z axes's are what you use to navigate and place the objects in the 3D space, 'y' is up and down, 'x' is from side to side and 'z' is zoom)

Fig 5: (After Effects) The yellow lines around the silver background show the boarders of the masking tool i have yoused around it to cut out and feather.

Here is the Final Product of the main menu:

'Snatch'

In this mornings session, we watched a film by Guy Ritchie called Snatch, in my opinion this film is, it's also a great exemple of what i want to do for my DVD menu and it is of the same genre and follows the same same sub-genres as what my movie is. It has elements of comedy, set in a grungy Brittish atmosphere with an unusual timeline and a crime related storyline. It gave me a lot of ideas for my own menu, as the film follows the same codes and conventions as me, i saw similar colours (mostly faded bright colours with gray and white), camera angles and cutting styles (fast and choppy). Although i have seen this film before, i had never looked at it in the same educational way.

In the afternoon i finished up some paper work, some sketches etc to complete my folder, there wasn't a lot that i could do because I forgot to bring the images i had started editing at home.

Finishing up DVD Menu Research.

After being given a sheet telling me what i needed to have in my folder so far, so i have been going over these and making sure i have every thing,
I have finally done my contingency plan, which is a table weighing the option of things that might go wrong so that i am prepared when it comes to the production. I put down 3 different possible errors for each stage of productions and ways that they could be prevented.
I also continued on my pitch, I have been using prezi to make this presentation as attractive and dynamic as possible, so far I have gotton to the budget stage, and since the only costs would be paying the graphic designer (me) i need to research the rates of hiring one on the internet.

Image formatting

JPEG:
(Joint Photographic Experts Group)
This format is a way or flattening image files and compressing them, the main downside unfortionetly is the quality loss, although they can contain a very large amount of colours. The colour code is Bitmap wich is an image created with bits, the number of bits determined on the availiable colours.

PSD:
(Photoshop Document)
This is the format that  is used when you edit in photoshop, it is also the default format you would save your image in to keep the layers. It is accepted by many other programs and internet image banks. PSD's also can use any colour code (RGB, CYMK, Greyscale etc.).

BMP:
(Bitmap)
This is a format for raster images, made by Microsoft Windows. It uses colour and B&W images, another advantage is that it is supported by a very wide range of software.

TIF:
(Tagged Image File Format)
Popular with Macintosh users, it is a very flexible image format. it doesn't compress at all and looses no quality. The downside is that, because of this, the file is normally farely large.

Site:
http://www.image-formats.com/
http://www.coolutils.com/Formats/PSD

Raster and Vector images...

Raster graphics are made from pixels and Vector images are made out of paths.
A raster image is a graphic image, as in JPG, PDF or GIF, it has specific dimensions, measured in Pixels for instance 454 x 340 pixels is photoshops default preset. If you were to make a raster image larger, the image would become 'blocky' (much as if it were made out of lego, there would be no round edges) this is because the set number of pixels doesn't change, you just make them bigger.
Vector images can be changed in size very easily, this is because they arn't using pixels, the quality would stay the same whatever size you made it.
Digital photographes are normally raster images where as computor graphics are normally vector images,k this is so that logo's made on a computer can be made any size.

Site:
http://www.sharpened.net/helpcenter/answer.php?52
http://www.larabank.com/photoshop/vector_raster.html

Skills Profile

I have been using photoshop for about 2 or 3 years already, sao i know a fair bit of it, however, after sitting a lecture and a basic tutorial, i have realized that i have picked up some bad habbits, for exemple i haven't been creating groups to put my layers in etc. Harry also tought me how about the rule of thirds, something that i had been ignoring in all previous photoshop work.
I make films in my spare time, as a hobby and for practice, but, in photoshop i make posters for them and logos for the productions company. So I have experience in photoshop.
Here are some exemples of posters and logos i've made in photoshop

17/09/10 Film name logo

In this session i have been creating the logo of the film name 'La Cosa Nostra' for my film poster, I have been doing this to create an individual look to my poster, here is it's first draft:

The logo is for a Mafia/mobster genre of film, hence the colours red, black and white

Target Audiences

After a lecture on target audiences and taking a glance at a few adverts we have been able to, fairly basically, figure out the age, gender, social class etc of a target audience.
To give an example, the H&M advert we looked at (which unfortunately has now been deleted from youtube due to a copyright disclaim) was targeted at a female target audience with an age-range of 15 to 30 years old, due to it's artistic and 'cooky' style, the simplistic art of the advert shows that the target audience should have a higher level of education which indicates that the social class should be both lower middle and middle classes.