jesse n petty | Production Artist

These are DVD menu's that was created for the Metro Police Department for Las Vegas, NV. The first menu was for the Department presentation of a PSA. The second DVD menu was for Officer Brown who did a lot of the acting for the PSA.

The Las Vegas Metropolitan Police Department needed a PSA down in a Grand Theft Audio concept. The full design was intended to be in a video game design but shooting it with real actors and real scenes. The Production and Post work was coordinated by the name of Josh Hudson. He was talking with me about presenting the material on a DVD to the Public Relations Department. By doing so we needed a DVD menu created. Josh and some other artist including myself brainstormed on how the design would look like. The concept of a las vegas silhouette came about and every loved the idea. Officer Brown was one that worked along side with the Public Relations Department and we decided as well that we should give him a copy with some extras for him to remember the experience. The cop car used in his DVD menu was from the actual shooting of the PSA.

Given the small elements that was given, research was made to figure out what was the color scheme. The main blue was placed because the PSA had a blue tint to it along with a cartoon edge design placed over the outline color. the color scheme I came up with is from this badge along side some colors I seen on the LVMPD web site.

Taking this metal badge I was also able to use the type face used on the badge onto the menu. Trying to match the badge and the web site type face was never a question, even though the DVD were going to an PR and a Officer, the professionalism and integrity of the work was placed for personal reasons.

The menu that is in the video was originally a 30 second looping animation that showed a blimp and a airplane taking off and flying into the sky. I wanted the design to represent the coming and going of las vegas.

This was another asset that I researched where I had the stitch badge in perspective with the cop car for Officer Brown Menu Animation. Officer Brown's Menu was a 30 second looping animation with him popping out from behind the buttons and a quote bubble would pop out with a saying.

I decided to take it out for more of a show piece, the quotes in the original was more of on-going jokes made between the Officer and the production crew. There was a lot of freedom in the animation and there was only 2 weeks given to produce both and give it to the DVD Author so that he could take the assets and code them for DVD release. Some times you can receive better images from the client but this was the second client that provided a picture of a stitch badge for a logo design.

If there was more time as a Production Artist I would like to provide some clients free of charge a "digital" logo design that can be used for print or film. It makes a big difference for a artist if you have a clean logo to work with but when you receive a picture of a badge from a shirt sleeve. You can only work so many miracles for a client given a deadline and materials given.

With well over a hundred hours of Photoshop experience I wanted to demonstrate the talents that I had with some pretty good looking rotoscoping. I looked through countless images take by one of the production crew members on set and I came across the cleanness shot of the police car with C-stands everywhere, green screens and lighting rigs. There was some other shots of the car with the production equipment but I wanted a straight on shot of the car with more equipment in the scene.

I wanted a clean cut out from the original to the final cut with nice shadows underneath giving it the look of the car being shot in a professional studio. Minor light corrections through out the police car to tone down some really hot spots from the sun and bring out some other colors that are washed out from the brightness of the sun.

I chose Photoshop for the rotoscope even though I did use primarily After Effects for the animation. Photoshop gave me a bit more control over the rotoscope of the car and elements in the scene then did After Effects. Some things are done differently in different applications where rotoscope would be better in After Effects than Photoshop.