Web Page Production

To create the basis of the website homepage I have used Photoshop CS3. This is to help design my draft and work out how it will look before trying to recreate it with the website www.wix.com.




To begin with, I have used the elements from the poster and copied them into a new project. This was to create a coherent link between the ancillary texts. The project was set on a landscape scale to fit with the screen of a computer. I then moved the layers into a different position and adjusted the size to fit in with the new layout.

I've noticed a spelling mistake in my tagline that has been in most of my texts throughout this production so I have changed it.

Once I had created the background for my website, I added music. Unfortunately I was unable to download a song used in the trailer due to copyright issues so I had to use a song provided by the website.
Shortcut to website: http://tiny.cc/lZn4c
Unfortunately, the site had some boundaries and the images I uploaded to the site appeared in an unsightly box which couldn't be removed.

Second Draft and Final, Final Product.

Because of the trouble I was having with http://www.wix.com/ I decided to use Photoshop to show the design of my homepage as well as how the links would work.

Below is the final product of my ancillary text. As you can see I have made many changes to better suit the conventions and codes I had found during my research. The homepage keeps a coherent link to the other texts in the promotional package as well as containing the main text and conventions similar to my other ancillary text, the film poster.

When finishing my final product I took in to account how and where the links in my sidebar would work so the consumer would be able to know where to click for a specific page.

To show this I used the margins on Photoshop to separate each link as you can see in the picture below. This was to enable an equal crop when I began to 'Save for Web' on the program.

The links on my homepage would be;

• Menu - this would be the homepage and base for my website with each page being linked back to this. This was a convention I found when analysing existing websites which I used in my own work.
• Synopsis - This would link to another page within the site that told the audience about each character and the plot line. This page would also link to the trailer and perhaps a cinema site which would be a convergence between two media texts - the audience would have the ability to be linked to a local cinema chain and be able to see the times for the film and perhaps order their tickets online. The synergy would be a new convention as I did not find it on other existing texts. Although, I did get the inspiration from cinema websites that provide a trailer, description and link to the official film homepage.
• Gallery
• About the film
• Soundtrack
• Media player

With these pictures you can see how I would create my links and how they would be selected on my website homepage.

The audience member would be able to run their mouse over the word which signifies which link they want to go to in order to get to a specific page, and be able to click it.

This image is of the media player that will be featured on my webpage. The media player will play the trailer which I made as part of the brief.

This was a convention I found on other media texts which I researched.

Evaluation.
In design, my website homepage is similar to my film poster which creates a coherent link within the two texts. However, the conventions I have used differ from each text even if I have used the same images, colour and title in order to keep a consistency throughout the texts and to show my audience a link between the texts in which they will associate with one another as a promotional package.

The navigational bar was a convention I used from the research I conducted. The navigational bar provides links to other pages of the site and aids the audience much like a map telling them where things are. In my final production I was able to create the design for my homepage and show how the links would be created by using Photoshop CS3. This enabled me to plan where the link would be clickable and also where it would be placed on the layout of my homepage.

The use of colour to represent the genre and ideology of the film, like in my poster and trailer, creates a sense of romance which is what the film is about. The continuous use of the colour pink in my texts provides a link between them and the genre. I found this convention when looking at the promotional packages of other films like The Proposal which uses a red and white colour theme, and (500) Days of Summer which has a blue colour theme.
The layout is simple in order for the audience to be able to navigate through it efficiently and effectively. I found that the websites I researched also had a layout that was simple with images that were coherently used throughout the film’s promotional campaign.

From my audience research I discovered that the trailer should be the main focus of my website and that when researching the conventions of other official film websites and found that the trailer featured on a multimedia player was a convention that was repeated coherently. Either the trailer would play automatically when the audience entered the site or on a separate page linked from the homepage. I chose to feature my trailer on a multimedia player that played automatically as the audience entered the site. This was because of the audience research I conducted. I did however, think of replacing the trailer on the homepage and playing it on a separate one, so I would be able to have a multimedia player with the soundtrack from the film which would also be able to link to a site where the audience would be able to buy the official soundtrack.