Making an Easter Egg
By Hal MacLean
Download the project files here
Easter Eggs, hidden content that users can find in a number of ways, are great fun to create and hide away in your DVD projects. There are many different ways of setting them up, limited only by your imagination. A favourite of mine is to use a button sequence – from a particular menu the user has to press a unique combination of navigational commands to finally get to the hidden content.
Setting these up is not difficult, but it is intricate, and it relies on you being a little bit clever with the way buttons operate. On a DVD the buttons on your menu can be visible or hidden, and so you might simply set up a trail of hidden buttons all over your menu. However, if the disc is in a computer player then the user might simply mouse over the buttons by chance and this will either spoil the effect or reveal the hidden content too early. A better method would be to place the buttons close together and then use a final button to cover them up. This last button should ahve no target associated with it except the menu it is in, and no navigational commands from it. That way a computer user won’t be able to do anything with the ‘hot spot’ they have found, except realise it might hide something for them to look harder for!
This same method can be used in a track as well, and you can use buttons over video to create the hot spots that you need. The project file works in this way but has a subtitle that you can choose to display as the track plays, as a hint for when to start looking. This kind of button over video method has been used famously in the Matrix film as the ‘White Rabbit’ feature. If you get to the rabbit in time then you get to the hidden content.
In this project, the subtitle simply tells you to start hunting, and a series of navigational ‘down’ arrows will reveal the hidden content. In this case it is a track that plays, which means we can’t use the resume information to get back to the track at the place we left off. However, I have simply set the end jump for the hidden track to go back to the chapter marker at the end of the subtitle button. You can add scripting to this to improve it, or leave it as it is… your choice!
The set up is therefore very simple. One menu as first play which asks if you’d like the prompt to appear (in which case force view the subtitles, and use an empty subtitle for when you turn it ‘off’), a track with some markers for the button in and out point and a second menu for the hidden content.
When you explore the track itself you will find five buttons on the left hand side of the main area, but nothing set over the subtitle. This is so that it is less obvious – there’s nothing like a whopping great sub title to entice folk to click on that text, so accustomed we have become to doing just this from our time spent surfing online! No, this egg is a little more subtle than that!
For some reason I have managed to jumble the logical order of the buttons I created, but it doesn’t actually matter. The important part is the navigation from button to button, which you’ll need to set up manually using the property inspector (don’t be tempted to auto assign anything, as this will give far too many ways of getting to the egg). You’ll also see how I used a larger button to cover over the others to prevent the casual computer user stumbling upon the trail. Check also the button navigation tab…
This shows the button stack. To see it, place the play head over the subtitle section in the track and then double click on the subtitle in the track editor. Now you should be able to see the button outlines easily.
This shows the fifth and final button being used to cover over the others. In this case the target is ‘not set’ and neither is the navigation. If this was in a menu then you might set the final button target to be the menu itself, but as it is in a track you really don’t want to go anywhere!
The beauty of this system is that the user only gets a limited time to go hunting – in this case only a few seconds (you need to press ‘down’ four times in that time). After that the track moves on, the subtitle goes and the moment is lost.
Of course, there is no way to prevent anyone breaking in to your disc and getting at the hidden content that way, but only a spoil sport would do that… right??
I hope this helps you set up a creative egg on your own disc… do remember to come back here and explain how you went about it!
