We were asked to create a new master for Malaysia, containing the film and its newest trailer.  This meant creating a new version of the DVD menu to achieve this, so that’s exactly what we did.

To wrap the job up for our client, we took care of shipping the DVD out to Malaysia.  Everything ran as smoothly as can be, and as result, our client was naturally very happy!

The school, as is their yearly practise now, had been working on their latest film project for their actor graduates. Rather than just pack the graduates off with a nice slip of paper, BSA choose to back up their qualifications by getting their acting graduates to act, in front of a camera! Having been professionally filmed, these scenes are distributed on DVD to various acting agencies and such like.

The now-regualar, BAFTA award winning director, Michael B. Clifford, was responsible to choosing the films, casting and directing the scenes. This year, they shot the films on a Canon 5D digital SLR camera in HD. 

Once we had the footage in our mitts, we worked out how to once again bend the specifications of a DVD, to allow for the amount of content and navigation required to show all 36 actors individually and together in scenes.

Taking designs provided by Make Brand Studiofor the DVD packaging and accompanying booklet, we reworked this in 2D for the menu design to make for some nicely dynamic graphics and transitions.  Due to the very tight timeline for this project this year, we were unable to create 3D menus as we had done last year.  Oh well…

Once the complex DVD authoring was complete, we next had to replicate and print the complete DVD packages in time for the very tight delviery schedule – that is covering both the discs, cases, inlays and 24 page booklet.

We hope that the graduates like the resulting product as much as the Birmingham School of Acting staff.

As many of you may realise, Birmingham Council is huge. Like, it’s the most huge city council in all of Europe! So, to get any work done, the Council is split into many different departments. We deal with a few of these departments, and on this occasion it was the Adoption & Fostering department once more.

For this project they have been focussing more on Fostering – they’ve covered Adoption in the past already. With Salt and Pepper Films, they’ve been creating films to demonstrate why people should Adopt and Foster children.

This year’s films had a bit more of a shock factor to them, but by all accounts, this has worked very well for their film.

However, the Council asked us to get involved because they needed two versions of the DVD to be created for internal and external use, with menus that allowed them to access any part of the DVD and films with ease, while also tying in with existing graphics that had been created for the print work such as flyers and billboards.

So, that’s exactly what we did, and our clients at the council have all been very pleased with the authored outcome.

We then had to replicate a few thousand DVDs of this project and a previous one, shipping them to a commercial printer to be attached to a couple of types of printed packs for distribution. Thankfully we made this a very smooth process for them, and the packs are now available to anybody who contacts the Adoption and Fostering department of the City Council.

Wow, what a busy few weeks.

The best part of April was spent planning schedules, planning processes, and working with people to ensure we could get our latest project for Birmingham School of Acting completed on time.

The school, as is usual for them, had been working on their latest film project for their graduates. Rather than just send out students with a fancy bit of paper stating their course grade, BSA actually back this all up by getting their acting graduates to act, in front of a camera! Having been professionally filmed, these scenes are distributed on DVD to various acting agencies and such like.

Once again, the BAFTA award winner, Michael B. Clifford, was responsible to choosing the films, casting and directing the scenes. A fair chunk of post-production took place at Second Home Productions, who after their edit work and grading dropped us a hard drive full of finished video.

In the meantime before this, we had been working out how to once again bend the specifications of a DVD, to allow for the amount of content and navigation required to show all 43 actors (up from last year’s 38) individually and together.

Taking designs from Make Brand Studio for the DVD packaging and accompanying booklet, we reworked this in 3D for the menu design to make for some nicely dynamic graphics and transitions.

Once the complex DVD authoring was complete, we set about replicating and printing the complete packages in time for a very tight deadline.

We hope that the graduates like the resulting product as much as the Birmingham School of Acting staff.

The Brace Media team are both happy and proud to once again work for and alongside the Birmingham School of Acting [BSA], to help them produce the 2008 Graduate Showreel.
One thousand copies, wonderfully packaged with an accompanying 24 page booklet. Please, have a look at the unashamed self-promoting photos…. Oooooh, shiny.

Previous years have seen us produce four quite different ‘Brummiewood’ DVDs to use as student and facility promotional tools.

Brummiewoods 1,2,3 and 4 had stories penned by established regional writers, which were filmed by professional crews and Directors, with the BSA students picked for the various roles in the short films.

The DVDs were then authored in a fairly straightforward way: Somewhere in the region of seven or eight films – playable independently or all together, with sub menus to reach info screens about the writers, Directors, crew, students, Brummiewood ethos and the BSA facility.

This year, the format had a bit of a makeover……

38 students, playing parts in scenes from 5 award-winning contemporary films, directed by BAFTA and RTS award winning film maker, Michael B. Clifford. The final DVD had to be able to: Play all films, play one film, play just the scenes [in some cases from more than one film] featuring a selected Actor, and return to a suitable place upon completing a required task too.
The above doesn’t sound like anything too special. Until you throw into the equation that each film was broken up into sometimes fifteen scene chunks, and the fact that we don’t really do DVD-Video like other companies; we love putting transitions from one menu to another – and from sub menus back to the main menu…. just so everything flows a little more sweetly and seamlessly.

So we have:
A main menu, with indepentent transitions from the options of ‘Play all’ / ‘Browse by Actor’ / ‘Browse by film’ / BSA info.

4 Actors pages with transitions from the main menu into the next and previous pages of Actors and a transition to the main menu from each of the four Actors screens. There are 38 Actors in total with each Actor having an intro screen before their run of scenes.

5 films, totalling 65 scene chunks. When played as a ‘play all’ selection – each film is preceeded by a screen of text.

5 info pages with 6 transition into and out of the main menu.

Now, as any DVD author worth his or her salt should know – the DVD specification allows for a DVD-Video disc to have 99 VTS elements.

If you add together all of the video pieces and transitions that we had, you are left with a grand old total of around 125 VTS elements, which would lead one to consider authoring the project for pressing to two DVD5 [single layer single side] discs or for one DVD10 [Single layer double side] disc.

If anyone around these parts is going to stick it to the man (strictly in terms of DVD authoring, you understand) then it’s going to be us.

Double sided discs? Two discs? Poobah, we reckon that a showcase should be conveniently placed on one side of one piece of optical media. Who wants to get half way through seeing the best that a facility has to offer – only to have to split the flow, and spend twenty five seconds turning over / changing the disc?

So, we took it upon ourselves to find a way of getting the 125 or so VTS elements onto one side of a single layer disc, and making it sure it was still within the bounds of DVD specification.

Brace would like to say a ‘well done!’ to all of the Actors in this year’s showreel. In our humble opinion, the Graduates from the BSA continue to get better, year on year.

The project which was filmed in Sardinia in 2007, on HDCAM, finally was completed in the first half of 2008.

However, Simon, with whom we have worked on a few DVD titles in the past, came to us for the authoring of his DVD which would be used for retail.

Having described our proposal to him of what we would do to give the menus their full context and life, he gave us the go ahead simply saying “I trust you guys – I’m sure it’ll be fine!”.

The disc contained menus leading directly to chapter points, to info about Simon’s company – European Drama Network, and to choose between English or Italian subtitles.

When approving the work that had been done, Simon did comment that the picture quality of the video was so much better than what other people had done for him in other ‘quick’ versions of the film. Well, we don’t use an encoder formerly exclusively licensed to Sony of Japan for nothing…

The completed DVDs are being shipped directly to Sardinia for their launch in early August.

Below is a sample of the main menu, and a clip from the films – used with Simon’s kind permission.

Good luck Simon – hope everybody buys a copy!
Anyway, everybody please visit http://www.europeandrama.net/