The website... It's, it's, it's LIVE! [Cue Frankenstein music]

Finally, after many hours of work, the website is done and it’s live! As you saw on my last website update, I was incredibly detailed when building this site, we carefully considered what to include so that it would feel like a real functioning school site and yet still acted like promotional material for the film. It was thanks to this great level of detail that the site achieved its original mission immersing visitors into the story and expanding the universe Jake and I created for the short film. However, it became apparent to me that there had to be a page that explained that purpose, otherwise the website was only meaningful and useful to the audience after they have watched the film, which is a problem because it is meant to serve as a way to promote the film. Simply put, I got carried away a little with the fictional school site. Thankfully it was a relatively quick fix!

I made a page dedicated to the film which follows the traditional conventions of film websites. I took inspiration from other short film websites like shortoftheweek.com and early websites for films like the Hunger Games and Ready Player to design the film landing page. I primarily looked at what they included ion their site, not necessarily their design as I knew that I wanted something distinctively different than the rest of the website and yet something that still developed a sense of branding.

After I was done designing the film landing page and adding things like synopsis, credits, a link to our media blogs, and space for reviews. I went through every page in the school’s website and linked every non-essential button originally placed for aesthetics to the film landing page (including the school logo) so that a site visitor can’t navigate the website without ending up in the film’s landing page and learning about the film and the purpose being the fake school site.

This site was extremely fun to work on because Jake and I got to come up with a lot of cool easter eggs and interesting details to place throughout the site! I’m pretty proud of my design and the functionally of it and even though it definitely took some time to get right, I’m so glad we went this route (and that I had the site-building experience to pull it off because it could have been more challenging otherwise). 

We have scheduled a meeting with Tina tomorrow to look over what we have done since the last time we met with her (which is quite a lot thankfully!). Oh! I almost forgot, here’s the link to the short film’s website: https://luislageyreedu.wixsite.com/stokhigh

Signing off,