Copyright

It seems that when I posted my video I infringed on EMI copyright for the use of the Katy Perry track in my clip I replied to the email explaining that the use was purely for educational reasons hopefully this will see my video remain on youtube.

The final Video

Making the video!

The time had come to create my final video project the first thing I had to do was acquire some clips to edit and put together as my final production.


I found some clips I wanted to use on YouTube so the next thing to do was find a piece of software that could download and convert the clips.  

The software I decided to use was TubeTilla this is the software application of the conversion site Tube grip I decided to use this software because it is able to convert the files to mpeg4 which is a format accepted by Premier.


Once I had my clips I then used the import function to bring them in to premiere where they would be shown in the media bin.

Media bin with my clips in.

After viewing the clips in the source window I then started to drag them down to the time line to begin editing.

Viewing of source clip in window.

Editing timeline.

I then began editing the clips in the timeline, I used the razor tool to cut them where I waned whilst constantly playing them through the sequence window to make sure I had what I wanted.

During the editing I wanted to set the scene changes to the beat of Katy Perry's track Firework. I decided on this track because I have heard it used many times as a backing track to sporting highlights and think it sits well.  

The piece of editing I was pleased with the most is when I managed to sit a clip of video where the cockpit view changes from car to car to the beat of the track and it looked very good.

During the clip I used just 2 types of transitions these were the chequered effect and the clock wipe. I used the clock wipe early on in my video to symbolise time because F1 is always against the clock weather its the racing or pitstops. I then used the chequered transition because I felt it represented the chequered flag that is used to end every formula one race. 

A shot from the media browser showing some transitions.

Full premier composition area.

Adobe Premier 101

Premier is the leading video editing solution from Adobe and below is a brief introduction on how to use the controls and different windows.

As you enter the editing environment 2 of the first things you notice are the video windows at the top the first of these is the source video window which is located on the left this is where you can view clips from your media bin a window which I will discuss later. 

Located to the right of the source video window is the sequence video window this is where you can view your video as you have edited it in the time line below the 2 windows. You will see on both windows there is a selection of controls that could be recognised from a DVD or Video recorder to guide playback usage. 

Above is the media bin where you import all the bits of video, audio and images you wish to use in your production from here they can be dragged to the timeline window below for editing.  

Above is the sequence time line window this is one of the most important sections of the program because it is where all the editing happens and things like transitions and effects are applied on initial setup it is made of 3 video and 3 audio tracks to work with. 
In this window you will use functions from the toolbar described below. 

Above is the toolbar this is where you select the implements to edit your video with, from the left you have...  

Selection

Multipurpose tool for drag and drop functions and selecting clips. 

Track Select

Selects all clips to the right of wherever you position it.

Ripple Edit

Ripple edit trims a clip and then moves up subsequent clips in the track by the amount you have trimmed.  

Rolling Edit

A rolling edit trims adjacent Out & In points simultaneously by the same number of frames.

This moves the edit point between clips, preserving other clips' positions in time.

Rate Stretch

Rate stretch allows you to stretch or shrink a clip. For example this could be used to put a clip in to slow motion.

Razor

The Razor is used to slice a clip in two so that unwanted footage can be removed or a transition can be put between the sliced clips.

Slip

By dragging the slip tool you can change both the start and finish frames without changing its duration.

Slide

A slide edit allows you to shift a clip along a timeline without trimming adjacent clips.

Pen

The pen tool is used to add, select, move or delete keyframes on a sequence as well as being used to make adjustments in the titler.

Hand

The hand tool can be used to scroll an entire sequence by grabbing a clip and sliding it across the timeline. It works in the same way as using the scroll bar at the bottom of the window. 

Zoom

The zoom allows you to close in on the time line and work at a minute level. For example if you were adjusting the sound levels on a specific point you would need to get in close to be as accurate as possible. 

The media browser is where all the Premier effects and transitions are stores in the form of a branch system there are far to many to explain her and now because there is a huge amount of them to experiment with.

Spot the difference

Below is an example of what can be done with the clone stamp tool.


This tool is potentially very powerful if you have a texture you want to remove something from seamlessly.


To select the clone stamp tool go to the tool box and hold down the picture of a stamp then select clone stamp.

If you are working with a texture that has a regular pattern like a brick wall in the following examples it is important to make sure the Aligned box is ticked this will help line up what you are transposing. Once you have the image you want to edit loaded hold down the alt key with the clone stamp selected and the press the left mouse button over the part of the image you want to sample then start brushing out what you want to remove.

Below are 2 photos the first one is before clone stamp and the second is after see if you can spot the differences.

  

Before

After

CD Label design

I wanted to keep my DVD label really clean and simple with good use of white space.


I took some logos and branding that would be important from my main cover design and used them with a new photo of a McLaren F1 car to keep the theme going from the case.

Initially I started with a blue background but soon decided that grey was the way to go as it contrasted with the logos nicely and looked good behind the photo of the F1 car I had edited and resized.

This is the final look for the cd label.  Clean, minimalist  and clear what the disk is when its looked at in the console or in the case.

Above is the image I edited and cleaned up to make the F1 image at the bottom of the label.


I did this mainly with the magnetic lasso tool and the eraser zooming in close to get maximum accuracy. 

The final Game cover design

Im very pleased with my final cover design i feel it captures many things i looked for in my look and feel  ideas and wouldn't look out of place on a game store shelf. 

Final info-graphic touches

After setting the last part of my info-graphics I noticed that there were a couple of things missing from my rear cover these were A barcode, Microsoft logo, Dolby digital logo and a warning to those with photo sensitive conditions. 


I went online and acquired the correct barcode information & logos and set to putting them in my design.


Below is how they looked after I had pasted and used the transform tool to make them smaller  

After I had placed them I thought that the white backgrounds to the new images didn't look very good and spoiled the whole look so I decided to have a play with the controls in the layer styles for each image and found that I could make the white of the images transparent by adjusting in the Blend if section moving the "This layer" slider towards black which made the white section transparent. 

Below are the finished images after removing white

Rear cover info-graphics

On the rear of any game there is usually a section at the bottom that tells the user some technical information about the game this can be things like Amount of players, Screen resolutions supported, save game space required, age rating  & wether there is downloadable content available to extend the life of the game. 


Pictured below is such a section from an existing game 

At first I thought it would be possible to cut these bits from an existing cover but after a couple of attempts I decided to create my own in a new .PSD file and then copy and paste them in to the final game cover.


The way I went about this was to create a white slightly transparent box so the images would have a constant backing to sit on I then created a large white empty PSD and then drew a rectangle with rounded edges using the draw tools.

After this I then drew a rectangle with the tool in grey then marked it out with rulers so I could accurately draw the inner white rounded rectangle inside. This then gave me the right shape to enter the text in to so I could make my info boxes look just like the original ones used by Microsoft game developers.

The next stage was to add the text to each box and then paste them in to the main game cover. Just like the original images I used a bright green #00FF00 for technical information referring to game play and bright orange #ff6000 for information referring to the games online capabilities.  

After each of these was created I selected both the box and text layers and copied the merged image to the main game cover I set up some guides in the main drawing to get the spacing even just as it would be on a real game cover.  As I transferred each image I reduced the size of them all by 80% so they would be an appropriate size for my image.  I was aware that this would probably have to be done because of the size of the PSD I had created to make the images in.

The next stage was to cut and paste the age rating information which I was able to cut from an existing game. I was able to cut the one for the rear giving it a fine black outer boarder and the one for the front with a nice fine white outer boarder because it was going on to a mostly black background. 

Rear cover photo text

Once I had got the position and size of the photos the way I wanted it was time to find the right look for the text describing the photos.


The look I imagined was of the Polaroid photos that have been written on in Biro so i looked for a font and managed to get just the right font imaginatively called "Biro" pictured in the font book below. 

In Photoshop I used the text tool to type in what was required and then used the transform tool to rotate the text to it looked like it had been written on the Polaroid by hand. 

Examples below

Rear cover imagery

In my mind I had the feeling I wanted the rear cover to be as clean and minimalist  as possible while still providing screen shots and information which is important when the game is on the shelves of a store and someone picks it up to have a look.


I decided that I would cut out and paste a top down image of a current F1 car and then place the screen shots as if they were Polaroid's that had been thrown on the below image almost as if they were spy shots of the competition.


First I added the below image as the background 

After this I then took 4 screen shots that I liked and made them in to shots that look like Polaroid's first I opened one image and used the photoshop image information to see how big it was and then I took the width and height adding 40px to the total to the width, 80px to the height and then created a new image in photoshop to the new measurements making sure that the background colour was set to white and not transparent.

Once this was done I then added guides to the top 20px down and the left 20px in and used this as a template to create the white surround for each photo I then loaded in the photo's one at a time locked to the 2 guides and saved each one as a very high quality .jpg so minimal  quality was lost to then import in to the main design later on with the white surround 

Creating this

Once all the Polaroid style shots had been created it was time to lay them out on the back cover. 
When taken in to the main project it became clearer that the images needed to be reduced by around 30ish percent each to get the right size and feel.
As I reduced the size of each image I also gave them a varying amount of tilt so they would look like they had been thrown and slid across the image below.  

Transform toolbar

As I was laying the images out I started to think they looked a little flat with little effect that they  were photos that had been thrown on top of each other so I decided to use some drop shadow on the photos so that they would have a little bit more depth to the edges and would lift up a little like real Polaroid's would.

The way I added drop shadow to the images was by double clicking on each photo's thumbnail which brought up layer styles and then from the left of the window selected drop shadow and then double clicked on it to bring up the controls you see in the image below.

After the process was completed this is how the final imagery on the rear cover looked 

  

Finalising the front cover

Once I had decided on which colours and styling I liked for the fire on the front cover it was time just to add some information and extra detail to finish it off.


The first component I had to add was the F1 logo this is a registered trademark of Bernie Ecclestone & the FIA.
The importance of having this official logo to the game is massive because at a glance a F1 fan that hasn't seen any advertising could instantly recognise that this is the official game with all the accurate teams and cars within it.


After this I thought that the centre of the cover looked a little bare and a waste of space. So after thinking about what I could do that would add to the image and the information aspects of the cover I decided on a image of a Formula 1 car gearbox.
The reason for this is that the game contains alot of elements around tuning and setup of the car and I felt that the gearbox was a interesting nod towards these more advanced features. 

The way I achieved  the effect of the gearbox floating through the flames was by double clicking on the thumbnail for the gearbox in the layers window which open's the layer style window and from here you can adjust opacity and many other things below.

Playing with fire

After positioning the car over the fire image once I wondered what the fire would look like a different colour to contrast more with the red of the car so I selected the the invert option from the tool bar to see what they will look like in blue.

Adjustment Menu where the invert button is located.

Before 

After

After trying this spending some time looking at it and asking fellow students I've decided to stick with the original fire option because it does capture the feel i want better than the blue image. 

Snip Snip

After looking at my car image that I had selected for the front cover I noticed several things I would have to be aware of when cutting the image.

The first of these was the lack of contrast between the Car and the black background which told me I would have to select and then cut what I needed manually. On further inspection I noticed that most of the lines were straight in the image and I could use the  Polygonal lasso to cut it.

Image with low contrast between the car and background 

Selecting the Lasso tool from the menu 

Close up of menu selection

Beginning of selection round the image