DVD: Design Development and Navigation Architecture

When designing my DVD navigation I knew I wanted to show case my characters that featured within each of my animations right from the beginning. I was originally only going to use my raccoon character on the main menu as he is sort of like my mascot character but I didn't really like just having an image of him that you couldn't interact with.

I decided that the only text that could properly tie in with my artwork was my own hand writing so I used it to display on my navigation menu and DVD jacket. I wanted this text to be animated and wobbly on the DVD menu but the Photoshop technique to creating menus doesn't allow animation.

I decided that I would draw clickable buttons for each of my animations featuring the characters from each of my animations: dynamic, expressions, flash, stop motion and 3D (this is the character I modelled, not the rigged character I ended up animating.)

Hovering over each button will bring up the text 'play' which becomes active when clicked, leading you to the animation featuring that character.

Visually, I really love this design but I am worried that it might be hard to understand what links to what. I will have to think about revising this for a proper show reel to get me into employment, perhaps with text or the title of each animation. I feel that for this design though, it would make it too cluttered and I wanted a simplistic design that just said 'this is me and this is my art' immediately from first viewing. 

Next time I will definitely be revising my menu to include text about which movie is from what unit and what form of animation it was made with.

Jacket design done in Photoshop, featuring buttons from my menu and a new drawing of my main and favourite character from my films. I have tried to combine backgrounds from my flash animation into this design along with my menu buttons so that everything ties in together and remains relevant.

I have also included my contact details on this cover as they did not appear in the show reel itself.

I chose to use quite a slow, soft melody for my show reel as I personally felt that it fit my work better than something fast paced and upbeat. I considered a fast paced song but I thought that it just didn't fit the current tone of my work that I included within my showreel. Next time, with some faster paced work with more action maybe I will consider a faster paced song. For now, I think this fits best. I don't want the music to distract from the content being viewed and so I think this song provides a nice background noise.

The song is called Flare and it is from Homestuck Vol. 8.