Evaluation: Video

What went wrong: 

I had a lot of trouble with importing the title that I created and at the end I gave up on it.

Some of the videos that I found on youtube were really good however they were available in 480p only so I couldn't use them.

I had an annoying problem where I was basically half way done and my program crushed. It was really bad since I didn't save it at all and I had to start over.

What went well: 

I'm really happy with the clips that I found. I believe that they work really well with each other.

The song I chose is really good as well. I have actually seen a AMV with the exact same song and it was really good. I couldn't make it as good since I had to create a one minute video instead of 4 minutes +.

Some of the clips that I used had transitions added to the already which made my work a bit easier.

What would I do differently:

If I could start again I would make the sure that I could use the title that I have created.  I was really dissapointed when it didn't work.

Secondly I looked into more effects. I only use two different video transition effects and one music transition. I believe that there's many more interesting effects that I could use.

 Thirdly I would work on the music more. At the moment I only have a song without any effects whatsover. I could change it by adding some kind of weapons sounds, running sounds, screaming etc.
I feel that would make the experience of watching the video much better.

Evaluation: Dvd Disc

The hardest part of the assignment for me was the disc. I didn't enjoy using illustrator as much as photoshop and premiere and I believe that out of the three files that we had to create the disc is the worst one.

What went bad: 

 I don't think that my background really fits with photoshop case and the video. With the other two I chose darker colours - mostly blue and with the disc I used red background with some effects to it.

Overall time that I spent on the disc wasn't enough. I focused way too much on the video and the case which is probably why I'm not too happy with the disc.

I had a lot of trouble with the text wrap. For some reason it would only go at the bottom instead of top.

What went well:

The text that I created and talked about previously worked really well with the red background.

Effect that I used on the background and Shepard's picture worked really well. I went for the charcoal effects which made look everything a bit like from a cartoon.

What would I do differently:

First of all I would spend more time on the dvd disc. I didn't focus enough on the dvd disc.

I would also resarch into the effects a bit more. Although I used effect on pretty much every part of the dvd disc I basically used two different effects which when you look at the list of available effects isn't enough.  

Evaluation: Dvd Case

This the evaluation of my dvd case:

What went wrong:
The biggest regret that I have is that I didn't create the background myself. I found few tutorials about making a space background in photoshop but at the end I haven't used any of them.

Another thing is that I haven't looked at many dvd cases before making main. Most of the dvd cases look alike in a way that they all have barcode, age rating and stuff like that. If I would look at some of the dvd cases out there I would know what to include, where to include etc.

The last thing is that I haven't came up with any name for the game. I decide to just go with "Mass Effect" which is not very original.

What went well:

I am happy with the front side of the case. At the beginning I planned to have Shepard's face and the title above but it look really empty. At the last moment I decided to edit it and I added to other characters: Grunt and Thane behind shepard. That gave the whole side a lot more details and depth.

I'm really have with the title that I created in photoshop with help of youtube tutorial. It'the magma styled-text that took me a while to create. I decided to use it not only because it looked cool but because the magma texture looks a lot like the destroyed planets that are used on the original mass effect cases.

What would I do differently:

The first thing that I would differently is making the background myself. I think that even if it looked worse than the background I used it would still be better than using already-made background.

Secondly I would make sure that all of my transitions are accurate. With some of the objects I didn't do a good job. For example Shepard's part of the head is slightly cut off.

Lastly I would looked into more techniques and effect that we haven't covered in the lesson. That would give me extra marks and made my case look much better.

Video: Final Version

Today I have finished the final version of my video.

At the beginning and end of the video I used black matte. At the start I inserted the name of the company and "present" text. Both of those text have transition effect added to them. I used that effect because otherwise it looked bad and unprofessional.


I was thinking a lot about adding the company logo at the start as well but at the end I felt that there would be too many objects on the screen. That's why I decided to put the logo at the end of the video together with the company name again.


The song that I used is "This Is War" by Thirty Seconds To Mars. I decided to use this song because it really fit the whole "war" environment. I would call that song a rock song, but it's not too "strong" in my opinion. The song has two parts in it. Firstly it's calm and slow and the second is slightly faster and more intense. To fit the music with the clips I tried to put more "peaceful" clips at the beginning and space battles and other intense clips like that closer to the end. I believe I did quite a good job and I'm happy with the result.

Effect wise I used transition effects on most of the clips. I used transition because I wanted to avoid that sudden change between clips.

Some of the clips didn't work well with transition so I had to either cut them or got rid of them. Throught making the video I had about 50 different short clips but I ened up using about 10.

Overall I would say that I'm happy with the result but if I could do it again, I would definitely do a lot of stuff differently.

Video: First Draft

Today I have finished the first draft of my mass effect project video. I am happy with the results so far although there is a room for improvements.


The clip I used were found on youtube. I used clips from three different videos which will be included in the source folder.
The overall idea I had was to focus on three characters from the game (apart of shepard) Thane, Jack and Grunt. The reason I did that is that there was a lot more clips of those three than any other characters.

Throught the video I included some space battles scenes and mostly grunt & thane fighting with various enemies. The order of the clips may change depending on music. I would like to make sure that the music fits to the images at all time.

I have not chose the music that I will use however I selected three that I will choose from.

Video: First Steps

Today I have started to create a video for my mass effect project. First thing that I did before setting up the project file was a little bit of research.

I went on YouTube to look for a appropriate clips that I could use. Luckily  there was a lot of videos to choose from and I decided to combine and use clips from more than one video.

When I got the clips that I needed I went to properties of each of them and checked the details. All of the videos that I chose had framerate between 25 and 30.
Because of that for my sequence I chose to use , AVCHD 720p 25 FPS. I could use 30 FPS however there would be a risk that some clips, especially with lower FPS like 25 wouldn't work efficiently with 30FPS sequence.

Dvd disc: Second draft

 This is the second version of my dvd disc.

For the background I used normal solid red colour. I added brush strokes - accended edges. I had to use more than one accented edge effect to make the background look like that. I decided to go with this background because for some reason in fits to the war theme in my opinion. It looks a bit like a camouflage from few war games.

What I will have to do is change the title because it is pretty much impossible to read it at the moment. I will probably create my own custom style for the title.

I also feel that the middle is a bit empty so I will possibly add a picture of shepard there as well.

Dvd Disc: Final Version

This is the final version of my dvd disc.

As you can see it looks much different then the draft version. Reason for that is because I wanted to make my disc look more vector based. The background that I used previously was a bitmap.

For the background I used normal solid red colour. I added brush strokes - accended edges. I had to use more than one accented edge effect to make the background look like that. I decided to go with this background because for some reason in fits to the war theme in my opinion. It looks a bit like a camouflage from few war games.

I got the shepard picture from the internet. I wasn't happy with it because it looked too realistic for my dvd disc. I spend a lot of time going through different effects and I finally decided to go with a charcoal style. It made look shepard more like a cartoon character which really fits to my design.

Double Charge is the name that I went with for my company. As you can see the main colour of my company is green and that's why the name and the logo is in green.

With the logo, I decided to keep it simple and small. The reason for that is that I didn't want it to steal attention from other parts of the disc.

At the right side and at the bottom I have some usual stuff such as rating and small text saying ''don't pirate the game''. That covers the technical side of the disc.

At the top there's the title that I created and used in the case. I will not go into a detail about it because I created two blog posts about it already. The only thing that I've done was that I added the same effect that I used on shepard. I did that so that the title and shepard would keep to the same style.

The original version of the title was too bright and didn't fit to charcoal and darkish style at all.

Company Logo

This is the logo that I created and will use in my video and on the disc and dvd case.

To create this logo I used shape tool, pen tool and line tool. I decided to make my logo green because that's the color that will fit my disc and cover most effectively. I used pen tool to create the lines on the sides of the rectangle. I obviously used rectangle shape tool to create the main part of the logo.

I decided that my logo should be straightforward and should include too many details. If it did, it would steal attention from other parts of the disc and case which I wouldn't want.

Dvd Disc: First Draft

This is the first draft of my dvd design.

I decided to use a ready picture of a space battle for the background. I was interested in making my own however it would take way too much time and the effect wouldn't be as good as this.

At the top I have the game for windows logo. I decided to put it there because most of the discs that I had a look at had it as well.

Double Charge is name for my ''company''. I will later on add a logo for the company as well.

Dvd Case: Title - Layer 2

Those are the effects used for the second layer.
Stroke:
I used an orange inside stroke which added lava effect to the text.
Inner Shadow:
Inner shadow added a little bit more shadow to the inside parts of the text.
Inner Glow:
I added inner glow to the inside which changed the stroke to be more bright.
Color Overlay:
Made the text look more like a shadow instead of a solid color.
Outer Glow & Drop Shadow:
Both of those changed the stroke by adding a little bit more glow and shadow to the border of the text.

Texture used: 

youtube tutorial: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rRvB8_AxM2g

Dvd Case: Title - Layer 1

In this post I will talk about the title that I created in more detail.
On the pictures above you can see what the title looks like when both layers are on top of each other and next to each other.
That shows that in order to get the final effect I had to use two layers with different effects or effect details.
Let's focus on the top layer first, we will call it layer one.

Effects that I used for the layer one.Bevel & Emboss:
Thanks to the bevel & Emboss made the text look more 3d
Inner Shadow:
I used inner shadow to add the orange shadow to the picture which looked like lava.
Pattern Overlay:
Patternt overlay was used to add a texture to the text. I will show both texture used later.

Dvd case: Finished product - Spine & Back Part

There's not a lot to talk about when it comes to the spine. There's the mass effect title wrote with vertical type tool. I couldn't find any font that would satisfy me so instead I used stroke effect which made the text look bold. At the bottom of the spine I placed my logo that I created in Illustrator.

The back side of the case is more about technical stuff such as age ratings, barcodes, games requirements etc.
At the top I wrote a little description of the game. The purpose of it would be to make people play the game. To the title of the description I added inner glow and stroke to make it stand out from the rest.
I covered the text with a square with a stroke and without a fill. I did that to sort of keep that description together as one element.

Below there's three pictures of the game. I decided to put them next to each other because of two reasons. One is that other mass effect games have a similar layout. Second is that it saves a lot of space for other stuff. All three pictures are inside of little rectangles again with only stroke. It works as a border of each pictures otherwise it would look like one big picture.

Below the pictures there's a yahoo's game quote that I took from mass effect 3 cover and game requirements which I also took from mass effect 3.

At the very bottom there's a barcode of the game and age rating. I included those two because each dvd case has both barcode and age rating.

Dvd case: Finished product - Front Part

This is the final and finished product.

Front part:

On the front part of the case we can see three characters from the game - Shepard, Thane and Grunt. I decided to go with those three characters because I wanted to show more of tough and bad side of mass effect crew and I couldn't think of anyone better than the master assassin with over 100 kills and grunt: genetically modified super soldier. If you also look at Shepard you can see that he looks angry or ready for fight which also gives that "tough" effect. 

At the top you can see the title which I created with a help of a tutorial on YouTube. To create this effect I had to use two layers of text and custom textures. The latency of the second layer is 0 which means that there's only the effects visible. Below you can see both layers.

I had to use two layers because I had to use two lots of some of the effects. For example both of the layers have inner glow and inner shadow. Both layers have different textures as well.

At the very top I added windows games logo which in my opinion made the case look more like the professional ones.