As with all of the menus, we desaturated the image, mainly to prevent the orange from dancing off CRT television screens. All of the publicity stills were scanned at very high resolution, so we were able to crop in for the compositions of our choosing.
Pictured here is Jim Turner as Randee of the Redwoods.
Graphic ©2005 Riverbend Entertainment, LLC
]]>We had some fun with this one. These menu selections don't link to video, but to audio tracks. To indicate to the viewer what's happening, the "on air" image lights up when an audio track plays. The b/w photo is a shot from a few years back.
Graphic ©2005 Riverbend Entertainment, LLC
]]>We used frame grabs pulled from the actual show master. To make the chapters pop, we played with the color saturation of the stills. On a few of them, we cropped in to reduce the black background. The background image is desaturated.
Graphic ©2005 Riverbend Entertainment, LLC
]]>This menu features shots from years past. The background was "stolen" from one of the other publicity shots.
Menu graphic ©2005 Riverbend Entertainment, LLC
]]>We went with a publicity photo series for the background images on the menus. However, the background was a very vibrant orange, which would have ended up glowing or buzzing on some televisions, so we desaturated the color. A slight blur and semi-transparent drop-shadow were added behind the text to help it stand out against the still image.
The shot here is of the Duck's Breath cast: Merle Kessler (aka Ian Shoales), Bill Allard, Jim Turner (aka Randee of the Redwoods), Dan Coffey (aka Dr. Science) and Leon Martell.
Graphic ©2005 Riverbend Entertainment, LLC
]]>Note: The "Made-Up" menus pictured here in this portfolio differ from the menus blogged about earlier. After some testing, it was determined that the sharply contrasting letters, once compressed for DVD, induced too much noise in the image when played back on "normal" CRT televisions. In other words, "legal" NTSC broadcast video is not necessarily DVD-appropriate video. So we reduced the lettering contrast. This also meant that we had to redo the layout on many screens -- especially the chapter selections menus, where the softer lettering was overpowered by the chapter images' borders. In the end, I think we achieved a better overall result.
Graphics ©2005 Riverbend Entertainment, LLC
]]>We were fortunate to have some nicely composed stills to work from. In deciding on the style for these menus, Riverbend president Leonard Feldman agreed with our recommendation to use that production value in the overall approach to the menus' design, rather than create designs from scratch.
Graphics ©2005 Riverbend Entertainment, LLC
Given our approach to the menu style, much of our work focused on getting the text to stand out against the background, without making it too "contrasty" (which can lead to visible "noise" on CRT-type televisions).
Graphics Copyright 2005 Riverbend Entertainment, LLP
The chapter menus changed the most in our final revisions. Prior drafts had the chapter numbers breaking out of the chapter image frames, but this approach did not work for the semi-transparent numbers.
This particular menu also provided the challenge of fitting five chapter selections on the screen. (The other chapter menus have four selections each.) As we were working with background images of differing composition, we had to figure out a click-through logic for the chapter menus' architecture. The final decision was to go with a clockwise selection order, which is what you will see on each chapter selection menu in the DVD.
Graphics ©2005 Riverbend Entertainment, LLP
]]>