Notes on the design of "How To Make Your Movie"
by Tom Erlewine, Art Director

How we arrived at the look of the Interactive Film School
When Rajko first described his CD-ROM film school, he painted a wonderful mental picture of the place: a city street and a worn-out building with a locked front door. He had rough sketches’a storyboard’showing movement and camera angles. It was very much a filmmaker’s approach to a CD-ROM.

Computer-generated graphics weren’t going to create the look that we were after. I didn’t feel we could capture the dusty, gritty environment that way. We decided to photograph a real space to use as our starting point.

We were lucky — really lucky — to find a perfect location right nearby. On a ridge overlooking our town is a closed-up mental institution built in the 1800’s. Its halls and rooms seem to wander on forever, and they’re locked up and empty. It’s even a little spooky.

The Interface
We didn’t want a computer interface to intrude on the visual space. Ideally, it would feel like you’re moving through real space with freedom to follow your curiosity. (We wanted to minimize the sense that the user is “ACCESSING PROGRAM CONTENT.”)

The earliest sketches included tiny icons to show when sound, video or text was available. Wrestling with the design, we were able to eliminate these icons one by one. Eventually they were all gone, and we had our interface: the halls, the rooms, and simply a pointing hand cursor.

This lack of menus and hierarchy caused some controversy. After all, this is an educational CD-ROM, so what do we do for the user who needs to make a bee-line to the facts? Walking down the hall and opening a door will get old. The solution is the Shortcuts menu. This is a visual outline of every branch of the content. You can go anywhere in the school in a couple of clicks.

There are some places where a more standard interface seemed unavoidable. The “Match Cut” exercise in Film Grammar, for example: that’s a pretty high-end task for the Director authoring software to handle, and the user has to have some buttons to edit two QuickTime movies into one. So we disguised the buttons as pencil marks on paper and stayed within the look and feel we’d set for ourselves.

Keeping filmmaking equipment on the back burner.
Like other fields, filmmaking sees new technology introduced with every season. What we show as new equipment today would be old by the time...etc. This CD-ROM is not about technology. It’s about how to tell your story using film or video. That’s a big reason for this broken-down old environment. Rajko’s not focusing on shiny new boxes; he’s presenting the fundamentals that don’t get easier or better as you have bigger equipment budgets. This is nitty-gritty stuff that applies to each generation of filmmakers.
—Tom Erlewine

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