Producing my DVD

Firstly I brought in all my assets allowing me to see what I needed to connect where in comparison with the original schematic I did.


I began creating buttons on the menu, and linking them out to the appropriate other assets.
A massive pain for me was realising that I needed to create two versions of the menus in order to have the overlays appear from invisible to white, rather than black to white. This created an extra hour or so of work, but it was worth it, I was really happy with the way it looked.


I made it ensuring that when the Menu changed, that it automatically went to the first button, allowing for easier access.




And here are a couple of screen grabs that don't really do justice to how long this entire process took.




I realised that the menus transiting from one to the other with no effect was quite uncomfortable to look at. Rather than creating menu animations that I've seen other people do, I had to work with less technical competence. I used the standard after effects transitions>fade out, which created a very simple but very effective way of getting from one menu to another.

I added fade outs to all my videos in order to create an effective transition from menu>asset>menu. I also created slideshows of early storyboards and final storyboards, I set them so the space bar /next button needs to be used in order to view them.

Below is a screenshot of me previewing my dvd, it seemed to work effectively on preview so I burned a disk of it using the build tool and then putting the folders into toast.



Evaluation of the actual burned disk:

I have a few issues with the actual burned disk.
-The 'white overlays' for some unknown reason look more of a greeny-colour which can't be helped but doesn't help with the aesthetic of the menus.
-The pixelation of the DVD menu it'e self means that the nice hand drawn fonts have become a lot less legible, although they are still readable, it's more of an effort than it was in preview.
-The fade outs from all the movies worked perfectly on the preview section, on the actual DVD, for whatever reason, this isn't the case, it gets to a certain point of fade out and then just cuts straight to the menu, which is a little jarring, however, I guess it'll have to do for now.
-I forgot to create a play all option for my idents, which means they can't be seen as a sequence, which was rather stupid of me but nevermind.