Creating a DVD menu

For the dvd menu to my film trailer i wanted somethign slightly more scary and ominous than the trailer itself just to add in that extra bit of "oooh something wierds going off with this ship" as such i descided that the menu itself and any other assets that it would need such as the dvd packaging will follow a similar colour scheme, while I like to think that my film trailer will be more of a psychological thriller there should be some semi disturbing elements too it just because i want to convey to the people watching it that the characters really dont know what is in the ship or what they intend to do,

I would be like if you had new neighbores and they announced to you tha they have a nuclear bomb in there house. while they threaten everything you stand for do you risk getting involved with it since it might provoke them into attacking?,

the creation process of the dvd menu itself is rather streight forward besides a few minor technical parts, the menu is first created within adobe encore which comes with premire pro, within the program you can find several "preset" menus which you can choose from to create your dvd menu, what I descided to do was to start out with one of theese presets then compleatly change everything about it to make it my own,

the purpose of this was to give me a base start point where I could poke around and see how everything worked, which really helped speed things up. once I had the base preset I exported the menu into adobe photoshop






 the advantage of exporting it streight into photoshop I found was that it gave me a single layer for a background image, and then a folder with the appropriate naming conventions for a button, which you can see to the right of the image, because theese things were already present I was able to quickly determin how they system worked and was able to create my own custom buttons within photoshop instead of using encore, in esence i could design the whole menu within photoshop if I wished which was great!.

I created a simple background fo rthe dvd menu in the colourscheme that I wanted using an edited version of an image within my trailer, which was done by sticking 2 still images together to create one, then adding transparancy around the sides of the image and a red multply layer over the top to give the red effect.

once this was done I then created a sub menu for the films refrences I wanted this to be a bit more complex than the orriginal menu since I was teaching myself how to use the programme after never having used it before, I managed to follow the same conventions as I had before where I created a single preset button on the scene, exported to photoshop to see the required file structure then proceeded to create my own,

the last stage of creating a dvd menu was to make sure that all the buttons linked in the correct place and to enable music to be played while the viewer was on the menu screen, this was done by switching encore so that i could view the flow chart of the menu, which gives information about each item within the scene, the scene itself and the videos+music that are attached to it making it rather streight forward to work with since the overall idea behind it is similar to that of using kismet within the unreal development kit. just a mater of linking things to other things and having it work for you.

If i had more time to work on this menu I would of liked to create an advanced animated menu which I imagine could be done by linking buttons to videos and having the videos be transistions between one menu to the next, so it would look something like this

Button > "Transistion Intro" > Menu > Button > "Transistion Outro" > Actual video "Transistion Intro" > Menu

Would be cool to play around with but will have to wait till the next assignment.