Final Post – Course Reflection

This was my first real experience working with motion in design (besides the small amount of Flash we learned in interactivity 1 and 2). I found it really refreshing to learn something new and enjoyed working with moving imagery as opposed to the static design work I was familiar with.

I think it’s important as design students to get a taste of many different types of design work, especially that of multimedia as it seems to be the direction in which the design field is currently shifting and growing in. Even though the learning curve was steep, in terms of jumping right into software that I’d never used before such as Final Cut and After Effects, I feel like I developed a lot of new skills, not just in mastering technical aspects of the software, but also in transferring my design knowledge of the basic elements and principals such as composition, line, shape, texture etc. from print to motion media and I’m interested in continuing my learning in this area.

Much of my technical learning was done outside of the classroom, I watched many a Creative Cow and Video Co-Pilot tutorial, but I really enjoyed watching and learning about the great motion graphics in class and this encouraged me to blog about different things that I came across in the time-based realm that inspired me.

Overall this has been a really positive experience and I’ll probably end up taking a time-based class next year, maybe Type in Motion, to further develop my skills in this area.

Design Statement & Credit Info.

I focused on the classroom in which our section of time-based was held as the basis for the menu. I wanted to create something that was suitable to house both project 1 and 2, and the classroom idea was the one that I felt would work best.

The intro. sequence for the menu enters the classroom from the same direction and at the same pace that I (usually) did every Monday afternoon so that adds a little personal tough to it, and including the schedule was my way of opting out of a title screen in favour of something more subtlety integrated.

The door opens and the viewer steps into …another dimension? A room ready for creativity? A sketchbook of ideas? I’m not really sure. I guess I wanted to adopt a sketchy hand-rendered sort of style as that’s how most of my ideas for this, and other classes, begin – as a rough sketch on a page.

Every bit of text for this menu was handwritten, then scanned, as I felt that genuine handwriting was more effective than any of the “handwriting” fonts on my computer.

Overall I’m happy with how this turned out. Once I got the hang of DVD Studio Pro it was no problem, though the project itself was just soooo time consuming because of all the different buttons I had.

It’s too bad we didn’t get a chance to hand these in together, it would have been nice to see how everyone else’s turned out!

CREDITS:

• Created By: Fiona McDougall
• YSDN 3009 Sec. M
• “The Class of 3009 Section M”
• Instructor: David Gelb
• York/Sheridan Joint Program in Design
• Thanks to Don Wilkinson for helping me with the hallway/classroom photo shoot and opening the door while I took pictures of it and thanks also to the few people who were in the lab at the time who didn’t mind me snapping away.
• Fiona McDougall©2008

DVD Cover

It feels good to be finally done this, it was a challenge to take on all of the projects, but I’m glad that I did cause now I have a nice little keepsake to remember everyone by

Here’s how the cover of my DVD will look:

DVD Menu Map

Ok so my menu turned out being a whole lot more complicated, in terms of all the connections, than I thought it would, just cause of all the transitions and descriptions and so on. Here’s a screen-shot of my Studio Pro map:

Project Screen Example

Here’s basically how the screens for projects 1 and 2 will look. The title at the top and the button at the bottom will be animated. The user can either click the play (triangle) button at the side or click the [ ? ] button to read a brief description of the project. Phew! All this hand written stuff is taking me forever!

Example Description Sequence.

Here’s a rough example of what will happen when the user selects one of the menu buttons. This shows what the transitions both into and out of that information will look like.

DVD Intro Sequence – Part 2.

Here’s part 2 of the intro sequence for my DVD menu. This will begin when the user presses play at the schedule sequence and the end image will be the one that is used as the main menu with the front row of screens as the menu buttons.

DVD Intro Sequence – Part 1.

Here’s the first part of the intro sequence for my DVD menu. This will play then stop on the class schedule, the user will then press play and the second part of the intro sequence will lead them into the main menu.

Porject 3: Storyboard

Here are my storyboards for what I want to do for project 3. I’m hoping to include all project 1s and project 2s and create a menu that will both visually and conceptually link all those projects together. I also want my menu to be fun and interesting to look at and to use.

Good DVD Menus… are hard to find

So I went through a bunch of my DVDs and was surprised to discover that a lot of them have baaaaad DVD menus. Luckily I was able to find a couple that were pretty good – Snatch and Tim Burton’s Corpse Bride.

The Snatch menu uses funky black and yellow icons (like the one above) paired with stylized video snapshots and sound from the movie that loop in the background to create menu that is both fun and also fitting of the film itself. If you’ve ever seen this movie, you’ll know that the names of the various characters are important and the designers of this DVD menu have used it as an opportunity to introduce them – each of the looping clips introduces a different character. It was a refreshing change from all the bad cheesy text and graphics that some other DVDs have. The intro to this menu was also very dynamic.

Corpse bride also has an interesting menu. Whoever created the menu took the quirky hand-crafted animated style of the film and replicated this in the menu, creating an ongoing loop of spiders, bats, butterflies and other intriguing characters scuttling and flitting across the screen. The menu’s transitions are also nicely animated.

I wanted to grab some screen shots of both, but my computer wouldn’t let me so you’ll just have to take my word for it, they’re cool.