Where the Buffalo Roam DVD Authoring Analysis

Where the Buffalo Roam was released in cinemas in 1980 ; it was released on VHS in 1993 and DVD in 2005. 

 The first obvious thing that stands out about this specific DVD is that the movie plays automatically on your DVD player without actually seeing the DVD menu, initially until the end of the film or if you press menu on your remote control, this is quite a common trait in presses of old features. This is usually because the time it takes and the budget to author. As the most important aspect of the DVD is getting the feature distributed. Whereas newer releases like to show off with interactive DVD menus because of the work that has gone into creating it and the special features.

 The menu designs are extremely basic. All of the Menus have almost exactly the same design with the exception of the picture of the protagonist is different on the main DVD menu background. All of the menus are a basic white background with black text and a red strap of colour flushed horizontally through the screen. Overall it is quite drab and boring also not very interesting to look at. Everything is static, nothing moves in any of the menus, except the cursor marked by a cross, when you move it to select a button, on most of the menus the font or the whole button turns to from black to red and that’s how you know you have selected something.

The font used by the looks of it is a hand scribed font probably designed in photoshop using handwritten text of long time contributor with Hunter S. Thompson projects: artist  Ralph Steadman (different variations of it have been used for separate parts of text e.g. the heading subheading and main body of text) its not the kind of font that you would expect to see on a recent DVD menu, but once again its in keeping with the tone of the content of the movie and mirrors that of the main feature titles. However they could have maybe chose a font that stood out more and wasn't as plain.

There are not any transitions or sound effects when you click on any of the buttons; in fact there is no sound at all not even music. The buttons themselves are very minimal, they haven’t had that much attention paid to them and they have kept the design very simple. 

considering this is a newer DVD of an old feature it still doesn't have any features of the older types of press such as Cast & Crew pages that includes mini biographies on the  main characters in the film. These are all things that seemed to have died out in newer DVD’s. But the distributors haven't even chosen to add any other feature except the option of scene selection or Language selection. Also the DVD is double sided, side A and side B, half way through the film it stops and you have to turn it over, this is because there isn't enough memory on one side for the whole film so they spilt it in half. You don’t really see these any more either, they've died out, but that’s mainly because they've just made DVD memory sizes bigger.