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So far in Parts 1 - 3 we created fully working basic layout.
In the preparation stage I mentioned that we wanted to have access to specific portions of the disc, for example to play all mockup advertisements one after another.
Here is the secret part, or at least the Secret menu part.
For this, I created a short few second video clip that simply say Secret menu, just to tell the user he steps on something unusual.
I put this as a Movie to the same VTS1 as the other episode clips as any other part of the secret menu. This is because I will use Chapter List objects to pickup just a part of episode to play.
Obviously the first step before we start working with Chapter Lists is to create all chapters on all episodes, which is a manual process since I had to review the episode quickly and put chapters to the significant parts.
The end of the short clip will go to the Secret VTS menu. This will be a normal still menu as I had enough making animations.
This menu has buttons to:
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Play all Trail of the Royal Mounted - which is a regular few minute show in each episode. It is an original western serial from 1930 (really!), but over dubbed very funny way. One interesting fact is that it is over dubbed by just one person Jeff, but he said he didn't need much help to make it funny because the original filmmakers had very interesting way of storytelling. It was 1930s, what do we know! |
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Play All Commercials - yes the show has some number of mockup commercials. In fact it has few commercial for shows "regular features" that are actually never been produced. Remember this show tells us a story of a kids show that was running for 30 years already! |
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Play All Think About it with Professor Dave- Think about it is another regular show, this time it is a nature show. That show was shot in actual locations in Africa using a normal video camera. One may say, finally something classically educational - but nothing can be further from the truth. |
As you can see that authors of ultra-low-budget TV show have to improvise a great deal to create regular parts of the shows.
Anyway, I got carried away. Back to the business.
To create an alternative playback we can use Chapter List, also called Movie Branch.
What this does is create a virtual copy of the movie (that doesn't take any more space on final DVD) where we can add only the chapters we want to play and in any order.
For example if episode has two advertisements we want to play one after another, we will include the two chapters here:
When we play this "Branch" only the Chapter 7 following the chapter 9 will play. That is the part of the movie between Chapters 7-8 and the part of the movie between the chapters 9-10
Since we want to play list of all for example commercials from all the episodes we will simply create separate branch for every Episode that has a commercial(s), add the desired chapter(s) to its list and then link these Branch virtual movies together.
Same for the Trail of Royal Mounted and Think about it. Yes, for these other alternate routes we also create another sets of Branch movies. Even from the same Episodes we already created! Since these later shows are one each per episode, we will have one new branch with just one chapter for each episode.
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Trails of Royal Mounted will have 8 branches (blue), each from Episode 1 - 8 |
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Commercials will have 6 branches (red) from Episodes 1,3,4,5,7,8 |
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Think about it will have 7 branches (green) from Episodes 2-8 (there was no show in Ep 1) |
It is a lot of Virtual Movies, but they take almost no space on the DVD because they are just PGCs that points to the original movies, not a copy of the movies!
Of course, I also have to make the Easter Egg button so user can somehow get to this secret menu by a secret way.
How does the whole layout looks like?
Disc 1:
The Disc 2 has only four episodes which makes this much simpler. And I also didn't create alternate ending for the main menu loop which also simplifies the layout. So all is the same as described above, including the Secret menu, but much simpler.
Disc 2
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