Progress Report - Website Pre-Production

Part of my A2 coursework this year is to create a website front page for the viral campaign of my film. This is one of the two individual tasks I have to do in the coursework and I have had to plan the time I spent on this around my group work on the trailer and radio advert as well as my other individual piece the magazine cover. This time management has been one of the hardest parts of the coursework this year as during the A/S last year all we had to do was create one product which in my case was the opening sequence of a film.

I realised this was going to be an issue quite early on and that the individual work would have to be done out of class. Due to this I have done my planning for the website front page in small stages throughout the coursework period. The first real preparation I did towards the website in fact began a few months ago. Our lecturer gave us one lesson a week in a computer room teaching us how to use both Photoshop and Dreamweaver. I had already done some work in class on Photoshop when we were looking at how to create a magazine cover for the coursework so this stage was more just a refresher than anything. However, at this stage our teacher intended for us to create fully functioning website front pages on which all the links for our coursework would be held so that it could be externally moderated. Due to this we had to learn how to use Dreamweaver. This was a completely new piece of software to me and it took a little bit of practice before I got the hang of it. Just learning some basic things like opening tabs at the top so that I could easily switch between the pages I was working with became some of the most valuable information for me. During this practice we created a page with four links. The process is fairly simple once you’ve got the hang of it and I felt comfortable that I’d be able to use the software competently in my coursework later on.

Also around this time I carried out some research into the websites of films in the thriller genre or a subgenre of it. This is because the film that my campaign is promoting is a thriller and so I wanted to understand how the professionals create the desired responses in their audience. I looked at five websites Saw VI, District 9, The Dark Knight, The Matrix and 2012. At this time two of the films had already been and gone in the cinemas and three were waiting to be released. The three that were waiting to be released provided the most relevant information as the front page of my website will also be for a film waiting to be released. All five however gave some good insight into things such as colour schemes, the rule of thirds and what written information needs to be included.

Once the coursework officially got started and I got to the point where I was going to start planning my website front page design I went back to this initial research. The first problem I had was that the films that at the time I did that research were waiting to be released had now been released. This meant their websites had been changed and were now focusing on the DVD promotion. Due to this I decided I needed to do a textual analysis of another film in order to refresh my memory on the codes and conventions of thriller websites so as to best inform my own. I looked at 'A Nightmare on Elm Street' (Samuel Bayer, 2010) as this is a thriller yet to be released and also revisited ‘Saw VI’ (Kevin Greutert, 2009) which I had analysed in my initial research. After these extra textual analyses I felt comfortable to get started on the planning for my front page.

I started by carrying out an initial ideas blast in order to work out what I needed to include on the page. I also did a SWOT analysis on my personal strengths and weaknesses and the possible opportunities and threats of the project. Finally I did an audience analysis just to make sure that I would be focusing my design to entice my target audience. Once this had been done the production stages began.