Next up were the menus. I had a vision of the film’s iconic character, Billy Jump, explaining the menu options and harassing the audience until they picked something. To accomplish this, we brought back lead actor Stephen Thomas, got him into full zombie makeup again, and stuck him in front of a green screen. This footage was imported into After Effects, where I used DVMatte Pro to replace the green with a solid white background, followed by Red Giant Software’s Composite Wizard Light Wrap which was used to “wrap” the light from the white background around Billy Jump for a more realistic composite. I then rendered the footage as an AVI, dumped it into Premiere Pro and encoded it as an mpeg2. Unfortunately, halfway through the DVD menu creation, I realized that Billy Jump needed to move to the right a little. As a result, I had to go back into my AE project, move him, re-render, and then re-encode. I figured there was probably an easier way to do this, and I was right.
What I should have done was to import my After Effects project into Encore with the Adobe Dynamic Link function. Doing it this way, I wouldn’t have needed to render or encode the project at all. Encore would have done it all for me when it came time to create the final disk. In the meantime, any changes I made in the AE project would have been reflected in my Encore project, saving multiple re-renders.
Now that my motion background was finished, I needed to create the text and buttons that would go over top of the video. I wanted the buttons to be something a little more visually interesting than your typical underlined or highlighted text. So I had my wife and co-conspirator, Tracey Graham, illustrate some blood splatters that would go over top of the text. Although these buttons are placed into the menu within Photoshop, they are later turned into subpictures in Encore, and there are a few restrictions that need to be adhered to. The main restriction is that the buttons can’t be more than three solid colors. For best results I’d play it safe and make them one solid color. In this case, the color was pure red!
(Keep in mind that Encore does have text tools available for creating menus, as well as a decent variety of pre-made buttons. But given the unusual nature of my buttons, I needed the more advanced tools of Photoshop).
The first step in creating the text and buttons was to open Photoshop and create a new document using the “Film and Video” preset, which automatically uses the proper size and pixel ratio for TV. In After Effects I exported a still frame of my motion background and placed it as a layer in my new Photoshop document so that I could use it as a reference to give me a general idea of where the text should go. I then simply typed the text over that background layer, being careful not to type over top of anything that might be moving when the video was playing behind the text. When you’re choosing a font, be sure that your text is 20 points or larger and doesn’t contain any horizontal lines smaller than 3 pixels; any less and you’ll see flickering where the lines will seem to disappear on the TV.
I then hid the background layer and placed Tracey’s blood splatters over top of each text selection, being careful to put each splatter in a separate, descriptively-named layer.
