OUGD202 Evaluation

For the Design for Digital Print module I chose to work on the Movie Season brief and create 5 ten-second idents on a movie season of my choice. The genre of movies that I chose to work with was Vampire Movies because it is a favourite genre of mine.

I started by doing a lot of research into my chosen five vampire movies, being Nosferatu, Bram Stoker’s Dracula, Interview with the Vampire, Buffy the Vampire Slayer and The Lost Boys. I looked into the DVD covers, movie posters and film stills to get an idea of the design direction that each was going for. I decided pretty early on that I wanted to have very grungy, dirty look to my idents and wanted to have a consistent theme of shadows in all of my idents, and started to create textures and look into effects such as boiling and the distortion effects used by Len Lye. It was soon apparent to me that I needed to simplify my design direction as upon attempting to make one ident in the style that I had planned, it was a lot more complex than I had anticipated and took a lot of time. I revised my design direction and limited my colour pallet to black, white and grey; this helped to give my idents a consistent feel as I started to put them together. The idea of basing my movie season on the Sci Fi channel came to me quite early on in the project and the logo I designed to go on the end of each ident really gave them a feel of consistency. The original idea was to have music on each ident, but this was proving to be difficult to find music that worked and that could be shortened to ten seconds was difficult so I decided to stick with sound effects instead.

This project gave me the chance to learn how to use new software, such as After Effects and DVD Studio Pro. I struggled to get to grips with After Effects at first but after a while I seemed to get better at it and in the end it didn’t take me all that long to create my idents. I spent so much time on my idents that I didn’t leave myself a great amount of time when it came to doing my DVD interface, and so that has come out a little pixelated in places. But overall, I’m pretty pleased with how the DVD turned out; I didn’t think it was too bad for a first attempt. I also wish that I had left myself more time to properly work on the packaging of my DVD. While I like the packaging that I created, and think that it works and is consistent with the content of the DVD, I feel I could have done a lot more with it.
While I feel that I have learned a lot during this module, I also feel that it has helped me to realise that motion graphics is not my forte, and is definitely not where I want to go in my career.

I got so caught up in this project that I made the same mistake that I made in OUGD201, and that was to neglect my other modules that were running at the same time in favour of working on this one.
I feel that I have really gotten to grips with my blog over the course of this module and that I have used it well to record my work. When trekking through my blog, while I cannot say that this project was my favourite, I can say that I have done a lot of development work to get to my final resolution. I am pleased with the outcome of this project.

What would I do differently next time?

1. Leave myself more time to work on DVD Studio Pro
2. Leave myself more time to work on the packaging.
3. Learn to be more selective with my work when it comes to the DVD content.
4. Be more critical about my work.
5. Not neglect other modules running at the same time.