This work was commissioned by Massey film graduate Matthew Kelly for his honours project. It had a two week timeline, and required frequent iteration to match any script changes.

As filming was on-location at Graphic Comics (Wellington), a lightweight web tool was needed to mitigate any potential difficulties with whatever hardware was available. I considered producing this tool by making static pages, making it a glorified slideshow; But wanted the tool to feel more believable through little details such as button-hover behaviour and the interactive login screen.

Given the time and budget available for this project, I settled on using this free GUI pack from Itch. It was slightly more visually dated than our reference points, but enabled me to start working on the tool right away instead of spending time I didn't have iterating on a visual style.

I chose to use Unity's Canvas instead of UI Toolkit, as at the time I wasn't familiar enough to estimate a time frame properly. This gave some difficulties, as a lot of the responsivity that I desired for the tool wasn't available.

Attempting to create proper grid layouts and a viewport-flexible tool cost me a decent bit of development time, when I should have accepted the nature of my tool and worked within its boundaries from the start.

A key decision I made was to fake the functionality of buttons. As there was unsurety as to how the tool would used during the shoot, I made it so each page just cycles with a mouse click. Similarly, the login page just listens for any keyboard input at all; instead filling the data required by the brief. This sped up development significantly without having any impact on the visual presentation of the tool, and helped increase the flexibility of the tool for shooting.