Creating the Website Homepage

After I had created the magazine front cover, I needed to make the films own homepage. I was more nervous about creating the homepage than I was the magazine cover, simply because it seemed like a much more complicated task and because, towards the beginning of the year when we had been given some preliminary practice on Photoshop and Macromedia Dreamweaver, I found creating the homepage much more difficult.

I began by setting the canvas to 600 x 800 and opening up the image I wanted to use as my background. I chose to use the same photograph for my homepage as I used for my magazine cover because I wanted them to be the same as both are part of the same advertising campaign and in my opinion should be as similar as possible so that this is obvious. On top of this background I added the text 'Castle Cove' in the same font as I had used for the title on the magazine cover; 'DuerTWOo' by www.dafont.com. These two elements; the background image and the title, were the only two things I took from the magazine cover. After this I wanted to add the actors name, Lloyd Naerger, above the title of the film. After this I decided to add a 'fish eye' effect frame, I wanted to give the effect that the darkness was creeping in, upon Ethan. The line around the circle was very clear and obvious, however I wanted it to be blurred, the black getting less dense at it reaches the image, almost fading in. I therefore had to use the 'outer glow' feature in the 'blending options' to blend the sharp line so that it faded into the image. This is what my homepage looked like:

(Homepage so far: showing main image and background, title of the film and main cast).

I then decided to make the links that would direct the viewer to other features of the website. After researching I found which links were compulsory on film websites, such as the: 'home' link, 'about the film' link, 'trailer' link, 'cast and crew' link, etc and which ones weren't completely necessary: 'photos', 'press', 'downloads' and more. I there for chose the ones that were most important and that would benefit my website more. However I left out the synopsis link and a link to the trailer because I wanted to add those to my homepage. I also decided to add the date of release onto my homepage so that the viewer would know when to book their tickets to see this absolutely amazing film. Right at the bottom of the page beneath the links, I added the credit information, which is one of the compulsory features on a film homepage. These credits included: institutions who produced and presented the film, actors featured, who the film is directed by, edited by, produced by, etc. And either side of these credits I added an age certificate, and on the other links to pages on Facebook and Twitter, as a 'follow us on' feature. By this time this is what my homepage looked like:(Homepage: showing a date of release, several relevent links, credits, an age certificate and links to pages on Facebook and Twitter).

All that was left to do to complete my homepage was add the video of our trailer to the page and a tagline.