Evaluation

I have a lot of mixed feelings about this project and while I feel that I managed to deliver products that hit a certain standard there’s definitely area's to reflect on and things to learn. I'm definitely happy with the way each of the products turned out and overall think that it went well. I'm going to break down each product, what the thought process going into the product was and any conclusions and lessons that can be found.

Cover

When I set out to design the cover I really wanted it to look authentic, to really nail down the essence that makes up a good DVD cover. This appeals into my design, where I borrowed a lot of the core elements from other covers and baked them into my own design, approaching the assignment as if I was mocking a real DVD cover for a company. There is definitely some aspects of the design that fall flat. The back cover is quite plain in comparison to most DVD covers, the gradient doesn't really hold it together as much as I would like. The inclusion of other companies logo's instead of creating fake companies, really takes away from some legitimacy because obviously these companies are not related to my film. This extends to the Actors as well, I'm covered by copyright due to this project being developed for educational purposes but using completely original images to make the cover might have gave the cover a more original feel.

That’s not to say that I didn't have a reason for using established Actors. One of the huge backbones behind the design process was 'how will this cover effect the trailer and label.' I'm not strong at original creations and my artistic talent isn't very strong. My strongest area is probably in my ability of recreation and trying to build something that looks authentic. I wanted to lean towards this strength and by using borrowed content, it makes not only the cover easier to create but it especially makes the trailer much easier to develop.

In the end I feel the cover looks really good. There is some definite noticeable downsides what with the lack of SVG's and the amount of effects that are displayed on the front. I do feel that the front cover is too busy, but when I was developing the cover at the time I felt that I needed to showcase more techniques for the sake of the assignment. This is a thought I ended up discarding with the label and especially the trailer, as I would rather the work look simple and elegant then be complicated and over the top. I want the overall product to represent what I'm tasked to create, and not a showcase of random aspects of the program's I developed the product in.

I definitely feel that I succeeded in developing a cover that looks authentic (to a degree) and showcases all the techniques that is required by the assignment. If I were to use this in some kind of portfolio I would be proud to include it in there, providing the job is not high scale which I think is the best criteria to judge each component of the project on. The design process while was very much touch and feel, worked pretty well with my work being slightly more efficient then what I had imagined.

If I were to redo the cover I would definitely focus on getting better quality sources or creating more original content. I didn't get any SVG's because I found it hard to find good sources for the graphics I needed, and I didn't want to bog down so much time finding resources that only slightly improve the quality of the image. There's definitely places where some of the certification looks terrible, but the certification being there is still adding authenticity to the cover, its still performing its job. However, I can't deny that using original content would have made some area's a lot easier. original content gives you a lot more control over how things can be posed, or how things appear. If I had the artistic talent to draw, making a cover for a self created animated movie for example would give huge creative breadth that photo manipulating and composition couldn’t reach.

Label

The label was quite difficult to devleop for as a whole, mainly due to how frustrating I found Illustrator to work in. When I browsed through my DVD collection I saw that a lot of DVD labels were either very simple in design, or simply placed a photo over the top. This led me to go for a simple vector based approach as it allowed me to showcase the Illustrator skills needed but also allowed me to keep it within my skill range.

Going by my blog its quite clear that I didn't do any real design planning or idea running when it came to the label. A big part of this was thinking up the dual katana idea and just running with it. Illustrator was a program that I very much disliked and vector editing in general was something that I wasn't really interested in so I felt that adapting an easy idea quickly would ensure I kept my focus. I felt that the idea in the end worked out okay, the katana as a whole are terribly drawn but the clouds behind them and the DVD-esque information really helps sell it as a proper DVD label. I even think that the cartoony aspect of the katana actually adds something a bit to the label , and that if they were just rasterized photos of katana something would be taken away from the feel of the label.

Again an issue with the SVG's appear here as well, showcasing that SVG's are pretty important in the general design of published goods. If I were designing for a real company though, they would probably have access to the SVG's needed anyway, so I don't particularly feel the exclusion of them to be a huge demerit to my work. It's still something to reflect on though.

In general I feel that the label looks good abet a little amateurish. There could have been some other effects or extra tricks I could have showcased off in Illustrator but it was really hard to justify including them. DVD labels are inherently supposed to be simple, and vectors in general are simple objects so needlessly adding effects feels like it would detract from the look of the label. One interesting feature I did like was the Image Trace, as it allowed me to use my pixed based cloud background as a vector based image. The image tracing managed to keep the same essence of the image, but almost turn it into a painting or cartoon form, making it conform better with the daggers and improving the overall look of the label.

One huge problem I ran into was that versions of Illustrator are not really as cross compatible as cross versions of Photoshop. I developed my label on Illustrator CC as I only had access to the trial at home, when I would bring in my work into class my layer information would be completely lost and the image flattened. Eventually my trial ran out and I had to find some backhanded method of gaining the CS6 Trials to continue to use the software at home legally. I don't really consider this a fair criticism of my planning, as I didn’t choose to pick an expensive software package as the basis of the assignment. Spending 100+ for 2 months use of the Adobe suite it something that I can't justify as clever spending, and I would rather my image be flattened if it saves me money.

If I were to do it again I think I would actually use Photoshop to develop the label instead. Illustrator gave me a lot of issues and half the time it didn’t feel as intuitive to use as Photoshop, a lot of the mistakes that I made creating the katana could have been rectified if I had used a program I was more familiar with. If I were forced to use Illustrator, I would try to maintain the same version if it through the entire process as well, as losing my layer's is really aggravating. I was lucky that the image was flattened after it had mostly been completed. An argument could also be made for having more rigorous design documentation as well. I had the idea for the label but I really didn't document it at all, which is sloppy professionalism.

Trailer

To be honest, by the time I arrived to make the trailer I was pretty tired of this assignment. After the DVD cover, my focus has been keeping things simple and like the DVD label I already had an idea before going into the making process. This again made me skip many of the fundamental planning stages behind the the design process which is hugely sloppy in terms of professionalism and is definitely something I should work on.

The reason I chose actors from movies I owned, knew and loved is because creating a trailer using original footage is an immense undertaking. The creative freedom is huge but the amount of time and effort that is needed to collect all the source footage and edit it down was something that I simply felt wasn't needed. The assignment calls for me to showcase my Premiere skills, and my goal is to create a trailer, recording and editing raw footage is easy enough that it doesn't really justify the time spent doing all that work. This could be consider me not being really into the creative process behind the assignment any more, and that would probably be accurate but I also felt that I could still create a decent trailer by using footage I was familiar with.

In Dragon Tiger Gate I vividly remember the scene where Donnie Yen walks through the field and I instantly knew that it was perfect for a trailer narrative. I was going to see the Raid 2: Redemption and one of the trailers for that movie had a static clip, with cuts over it, starting out showcasing the characters and then ramping up into action. I knew that if I took the design choices from that trailer and applied it to my film sources Id be able to develop something that at least looks passable as a trailer.

At first I thought the trailer came out pretty poorly and my vision for it seemed quite astray. The music track didn't really leave me much variance in changing up the feel of the trailer much so it ended up being quite bland. As soon as I changed the track however, the trailer infinitely improved, flowing with the trailers narrative much better and making it a lot more visually interesting. One huge problem was that I was very much 'freestyling' the trailer, which meant that I didn't record the first attempt or log it, as the design process was very iterative. I'm not sure how a real professional would design a trailer like this, but constantly manipulating clips and trying out different timings and tracks definitely felt really natural.

The biggest decision I had to make was effect wise. As all my footage is sourced from films and mostly edited themselves, I didn't actually have any real need for any effects. Apart from the transition at the end, and the effect time-line work on the title, there wasn’t really a need for any fancy effects. However, not including any effects makes the representation of my Premiere skills much lower then what they could have possibly been. It was a question of possibly making my trailer look more ugly, or adding needless complications for the sake of it or trying to keep my trailer simple and professional. The Raid 2 trailer didn't seem to have many effects either, mainly sticking to just simple cuts. 1 minute of film time isn't a lot of time and in that small time frame you want to convey the feel of the movie and the scope of the movie, so distracting effects could take away from the content of the trailer. If I was using original footage or green screens, I could easily implement keys and garbage mattes, but there was no need to apply a fake green screen to my source films just for the sake of showcasing these skills. However, if the assignment was purely a Premiere assignment and I had more time and more creative freedom It would have been worth it to explore the deeper parts of not only Première but After Effects as well.

Aside from that point, if I were to redo the trailer again I would intend to keep more rigorous design documentation and maybe apply myself a bit further. I would also try a different approach to the trailer, my design choice I felt was perfect for such a small time frame as pretty much all 1 minute trailers are cuts or fades to clips, but maybe parody some old style trailers or more dramatic style of trailer would have been fun.

Conclusion

Overall I felt that I handled the project fairly well. There are definitely times where my professionalism lacks, but I constantly kept the idea and goal of the product in mind with every decision I made. In the professional world, authenticity is going to be more important then creativity as familiarity is a huge part of marketing. This was the premise behind a lot of my design choices and I feel like I managed to produce 3 products that act in the way they are supposed to. Work ethic has probably impacted some of the work towards the end, but I feel that’s due to how the assignment is structured, the blog post's were really un-fun and I think that influenced some of my decisions as to include certain features or not. Time management wasn't too much off an issue on the project, and I managed to keep relatively paced throughout the entire time. In hindsight however I might have done design documentation for all 3 products at the start, rather then considering the designs one after the next as it would have helped me produce much better design documentation for the other 2 products.