So these days I busy myself with making movies, with the intention/goal/hope/pipedream to do so as a means to pay the rent sometime in the future. Now, this is not the reality yet, but I hope it may be the case sometime in the future. Over the past couple of years my friends and I have formed our own production company with which name we make movies, mostly fanfilms and the like - things we do not own the copyright to. Over the summer I was able to get webspace from my friend and create a website.
I designed and coded it, stealing bits from other sites, and conquering my total ignorance of HTML in the process. However, I have ambitions for site design that go far, far beyond my ability and, I think, my ability to learn in any short order. We are also coming up on a time where we're starting to get more and more press and more people that are totally unfamiliar with us will visit our website to discover who we are. We just won our first film festival, at least one film is going into the 2006 AtomFilms Star Wars FanFilm Contest , possibly two, another film will likely make a large splash in the fanfilm community, and our aforementioned festival-winning film is actually the first episode in a series, all episodes of which will be aired on local television in the near future.
Beyond those immediate points, we're trying to head in a direction in which we can make a legitimate living off of our work, as in, original works which we can own and distribute (as much as it offends my free information society feelings). Therefore, our website needs to be of some larger caliber than it is now. I've been shopping around for a web design firm that will be right, but I am hindered by our lack of monetary resources and my lack of knowledge as to where to begin such a massive search.
So, I come to you fine folks for help. If somebody out there knows of a person, people, or company capable of making the website I have in mind or would like to help out in doing a major website overhaul, your help would be most appreciated.
Now the trickiness comes in essentially two major parts. I want this website to be more than a showcase of our work and also more than a business contact. While I want it to be both of those things, I also want it to be an online community, similar to NP2k.com, another website and board I frequent. RPP is unique in that it has several different filmmakers all with different interests and motivations, and several of us are or will be shortly spread across the country. So, I want to create a system with which we can still collaborate as much as possible. Also, because of the fact that it's more than just one or two people, I want to split up the responsibility of keeping the website up to date. Right now, maintaining the website falls solely on me, but what I'd like to set up is a system so that anybody considered a filmmaker of the production company can sign in, update their own project with news or media and write a news post (in their own blog and/or the news blog) to keep everyone else informed.
That's the overall direction I want to take it, here are the details as I have them written down:
*Four separate sections -Profiles (little bios and blogs of each filmmaker associated with the production company) -Theater (place to view completed films) -Studio (place to view materials related to films in progress) -Script (place to view scripts and other materials related to films under consideration or planning)
*Separation of Films - Some kind of identifier and/or organizer to categorize films accordingly: -Professional work (more non-fiction type things, like demo reels for actors, instructional videos, etc.) -Non original not-for-profit work (fanfilms, other things using copyrighted material) -Original profit work (original films, etc.) -Personal "snippets" (a category for filmmakers to put any small, misc. item they might think is interesting)
*Individual Movie/Project Pages (each film/project will have its own profile/page containing the following elements) -Description/overview -Personal Details -Credits -Media gallery with pictures, sound, and video
* Profiles Section (the part of the website that introduces and describes each filmmaker) -one per filmmaker -expandable to add more filmmakers -each profile to include: weblog, credits, media gallery, contact info, about, and personal links.
*News Page - News log -2nd column for coallation of the individual filmmaker blogs. Ideally, what I would like here is a three column layout, with the News blog in the center column, sidebar information on the right and the titles of the individual blogs with links on the left-most column.
*Bulletin Board Forum
*Visual Style -Black background with white text and strong/bright color accents. -Different colored sections (as it kind of is now, with News, Theater, Studio, Script) all having a different major color to them.
*Ability for individual members to update own sections. In other words, if a filmmaker has a project on the website, then that filmmaker can upload material and alter the profile for their film on their own, similar to, say, a Myspace or Facebook profile. This will, I understand, require knowledge of database systems such as ColdFusion (name?), which is far, far beyond my abilities.
Obviously, this is a huge job, and one I wouldn't expect anyone to pick up without compensation. I haven't yet been able to even get a pricing on what this sort of thing would be, so I don't know what's fair and what we can afford, so even that information would be helpful, should any of you be able to provide it. However, if one of you beautiful people were willing to take a crack at the project, then I guarantee we would find an equitable compensation.
![[Big Grin]](biggrin.gif)