The raw materials

Before starting any actual design in Flash, I drew some rough layouts of how I wanted my final design to look on paper. Whilst planning this out, I thought about how I would use the images that I had been able to obtain, and then began editing these in Paint Shop Pro 9.

This picture shows how I selected the image of the eye from the DVD cover image, and using the crop tool eliminated all other parts of the image which I did not need. I then applied some sharpening effects to it, and adjusted the colour balance slightly so as to make the skin tone seem a little less healthy than it looks there. Due to the nature of the film, I wanted the interface to look fairly drab, yet inviting the visitor to explore at the same time.


This image shows how I used the image of the syringes which I found on the internet, and created the "back" button using a selection of the image. I inverted the colours, again to fit in with the slightly drab colour scheme and also to fit in with the black background.

The above image shows me editing the image I later called 'ring of fire'. In the screenshot, I applied a lens distortion effect to create the ring which would later flash around the "eye" on the preloader of my flash animation.

Shown here is the Sony Vegas 7.0 interface, where you can see the three channels containing the video clips, speech, and music which I edited together. Notice the automation fades each clip in, and crossfades consecutive clips with one another. I exported this video as an AVI, which I then imported into Flash as a sequence of images.