Website Production

Before creating our own website, a lot of research needed to be carried in order to grasp the conventions of film websites so as to adopt them in the creation of ours. The main conventions that we found in film websites were:

• Teaser Trailer set to play automatically as soon as you enter the website.
• Title on top right or centre using same typography as in trailer. 
• Background suggestive of narrative- often featuring location or protagonist.
• Simple yet consistent colour scheme conforming to genre. 
• 4-8 links to other pages on website (e.g. gallery, cast, book tickets) 
• Links to twitter, facebook etc.
• Reviews/ ratings of the film.

 By looking at the website for 2015 film Run All Night the conventions are seen and we were able to decide how best to apply these to our website. when going onto this website the screen automatically plays the trailer, after which the background displaying the title and other information appears allowing you to navigate around the other pages on the site. 

The design of this website uses a basic black, blue and yellow colour scheme hinting at the genre of action. This runs parallel with the background which involves the modern day setting and introduces the protagonist and other members of the cast. 

We used Wix to create our website, and chose the 'Film Site' template as our basic starting point.

The first stage involved choosing an appropriate background for our site, which portrayed the genre and setting of the trailer. For this we photoshopped a picture of our protagonist into the foreground of an establishing shot of London taken from our trailer. Upon customising the background we chose to have the image fill the whole screen and scroll down with the page, giving a professional feel to the website.


We chose what links to other pages to have after comparing lots of existing film websites to see which occurred most often. We chose to have pages linking to home, about, gallery, contact and book tickets. By placing these at the top in a subtle font size and colour, the website appears professional and conforms to the genre.

The most important part of the film website is the trailer, allowing the audience an insight into genre and narrative. We made the trailer a focal point of the page, making sure it was the first thing the audience saw. We chose the option to make it play automatically in order to immediately attract the viewer's attention- a convention we saw was extremely common in existing film websites.

Many film websites used reviews from national sources, such as newspapers, as a main way of promoting their film. In many cases, these often involved star ratings- something we wanted to imitate in our website production. To create this effect, I found a plain black star image with a transparent background on google and imported this as an image onto the website. I then chose an appropriate size for the star and duplicated it many times. Obviously it was key to put high ratings (we chose to do 5 star and 4 star), and also short quotes which would make a strong impact. We included the quote from 'The Sunday Times' which appears at the beginning of our trailer so as to display continuity. Again, we stuck to the black, white and grey colour scheme that appears throughout the website so as to conform to the aesthetic appeal of the page.

Below is an image of the final production of our website. Whilst the layout is fairly simple, this gives a professional effect. The genre becomes immediately clear through the background image, colour scheme and reviews. As you can see, the typography of the title is the same as used in the trailer, showing continuity and acting as a trademark to our piece.

 

Finally, we reviewed the layout of the website as it would appear on a mobile phone, making sure that the placement of the features would work in a portrait view as well as in landscape.