Website research

One of the feedback points for our website was to research more into other film websites to get the right idea of what we need to do to make it look more proffessional.
We decided to do more detailed research into our first inspiration for the website, 'Prom Night'. Because the film is distributed by Sony Pictures the website is based within their URL of sonypictures.co.uk/movies/promnight/

The above screen shot is of the first page of the films website. It has links to the homepage, to watch the trailer, register for email updates, and the films Bebo page. The main image is from the poster with just the film title, the tagline and release date. We are thinking of making an opening page for our film leading to the main website but aren't sure whether we have enough time. Another way of incorpreting the style of this website is to have a similar layout for our homepage, using the poster image with the title, tagline and release date and having a few links maybe to a facebook page etc.We will also have to put the institutions and rating, which we already have anyway on our website at the moment.

This is the homepage of the website: sonypictures.co.uk/movies/promnight/site/

After clicking on the 'ENTER THE SITE' link on the opening page the official site opens in a new tab. They've used the same image but enlarged to fill the page with the text in a different layout with the release date above the title. The background is moving, although it is difficult to see what the image is of, it looks like hands with light flares and is obviousley quite dark so not to draw attention away from the main image of the girl. The sites navigation is at the bottom of the image with pages such as 'About the Film', 'Cast & Crew', 'Trailer', 'Gallery', 'Downloads' and 'Soundtrack'.
The ideas we have interpreted from this page are using the poster image as the main focal point, and we've also chosen similar pages, as in other research we found most websites use these headings. Our navigation is at the top of the page however using a consistent font to the rest of the website.

The 'About the Film' page has information on the story, production notes, the making of, and the cast and crews prom stories. For our 'About the Film' page we will just have an outline of the story with some images.
On the 'Cast & Crew' page, detailed info about most of the cast and 'The Filmakers' is given. We will just write general info about the main characters/cast and about us the 'filmakers' perhaps with profile pictures also.
The trailer page obviousley just shows the trailer in the centre of the page. The theme throughout all the pages is the same, background, and text of the title and release date stay in the same place, the centre picture changes to various stills from the film with text boxes overlayed.

The 'Gallery' ^^ shows important images/stills from the film of characters and crucial scenes. The images come up as thunmbnails at the top of the page, when you click on one it shows up underneath but larger for example like in the screen shot above. Our gallery page will have the pictures from the photo album and important stills from the film.

'Downloads' has downloadable backgrounds and buddy icons. Our site will have the poster and backgrounds as downloads.

The 'Soundtrack' page links to a Myspace page with the soundtrack available to listen to and other information available. We've decided not to make our soundtrack a page as we feel it isn't necessary, because the 'Prom Night' soundtrack is a well known song and ours isn't.


We also researched 'The Crazies' website: thecrazies-movie.com
HOMEPAGE HERE!
The homepage has the film title in the top left corner with the release date underneath and also in the centre of the page above the trailer. The background is obviousley a setting from the movie with a sign to the right saying 'HELP US'. The navigation is at the top of the page with pages such as; 'ABOUT', 'VIDEOS', 'GALLERY', 'DOWNLOADS', 'CAST & CREW', and 'BATTLEMAIL'. Below the trailer is the institutions, release date, a phone app link, 'register' (email updates, promos etc), Facebook and Twitter links, and 'find show times' for local cinemas.

The 'ABOUT' page just includes the storyline with the same background as the homepage. (Similar to our idea)
'VIDEOS' has a few different versions of the the films trailer,our trailer page will obviousley just have the one trailer.
The 'GALLERY' has scattered polaroids on the page and when you click on one, similar to the 'Prom Night' website, it comes up larger.
'DOWNLOADS' includes wallpapers, screensavers and buddy icons.
'CAST & CREW'
'BATTLE MAIL' is an interesting idea, at first you have no idea what it is. It is an interactive game. You type in your email and a friends email and start an email battle, obviousley linking to the idea of the films story. Your friend can email you back and so on, continuing the battle. This is a good device to interest the audience and make them more involved and attracted to the film.

How we've changed the website

On the homepage we changed the font to fit in with the institutions at the bottom of the page (Agency FB)

We also used our research from the 'Prom Night' website, which inspired us to use our poster image with just the title and release date on the first page. We made it on Photoshop and used the same font for the release date as the website.

The 'About the film' page has the new storyline on it:
'Last year a perfect holiday turned into a disaster that would affect Katie and her friends would find hard to forget. Four friends went away, but only three came back.
Losing her boyfriend was the worst thing that could have happened to Katie, and is something she will never get over but she is slowy starting to get back to normal.
Katie is slowly getting her life back together again, he will always be in her thoughts. Time and good friends can help you forget. But not everyone can forget and go back to normal, someone thinks about it all the time, all he wants is to keep Katie safe, and by doing this the nightmare will start again.'
 
'Cast & Crew' page, we decided to make one because the two websites we researched both had one and it gives a bit of extra, personal information about the cast and crew for the audience. Here is an example of the kind of thing we wrote for the cast:
CHARLOTTE LOCKTON (SAMANTHA GATES) HAD HER FIRST ROLE STARRING IN ST TRINIANS IN 2007. POSSESSEDD IS THE SECOND FILM SHE HAS STARRED IN, PLAYING THE LEAD CHARACTER OF 'SAM'. KNOWN TO HER FRIENDS AS CHARLIE, SHE HAS ALSO MADE APPEARENCES ON TV, GETTING A SMALL PART IN EASTENDERS IN 2006.
CHARLIE WAS BORN IN GRAYS IN ESSEX AND MOVED TO LEICESTER TO PERSUE HER CHEERLEADING HOBBY. BY THE TIME SHE WAS 15 SHE WAS LIVING IN LONDON TO TRAIN AS A PROFFESSIONAL YOUNG ACTRESS AT LONDON'S PERFORMING ARTS COLLEGE.

Trailer
gallery
downloads.

FIRST DRAFT COURSEWORK

Main Task: Teaser Trailer

click link to see bigger screen - http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DizvggAD5Pw

Anciliary Task: Poster

For our final design we made the image a lot darker than the original to make it look more effective, to give it this mysterious look we can only see a section of the characters face, so it doesn't reveal their identity I think it makes more of an imapact to the viewer.

Anciliary Task: Website

WWW.POSSESSEDTHEMOVIE.WEEBLY.COM

Stalker photos

These are the photos we took in the style of the stalker. They aren't great but because of how little time we had, it's better to have something  rather than nothing. I think most of them look legitimate but they won't be seen for a long period of time so they're just for effect really. We are also going to put them on the films website.

Possessedthemovie.com

http://www.possessedthemovie.weebly.com/

This is a print screen of our website so far, we have created it on weebly.  We started making some links to the other pages.  We have made all the pages black, following conventions, as all the other horror movies use black backgrounds.  We also put the title of our film 'Possessed' at the top of every page so it looks consistant.

Website Hosting Search.

Today's lesson we looked at different website makers which are free to set up our own website, for our horror film. But most of them have a clause were you have to pay, so we are going to continue looking.x