FilmPlug

Fall is in the air. Leaves are turning, the industry is eulogizing new TV shows only 3 shows into the season, and apparently movie studios are redesigning their websites.

A week after Fox Atomic redesigned, now Paramount has launched a slick new site to house the entire family of Paramount Pictures entities including the rebranded Paramount Vantage (formerly Classics) and the recently acquired Dreamworks Pictures.

The splash page lets you know this is a juggernaut media company with more logos than a stock car - MTV, Nickelodeon, Dreamworks Animation, Marvel, and the aforementioned. Of course, the less marketing-minded visitors will notice the giant trailer du jour which is for Flags of our Fathers at the moment.

The Paramount-branded links (Pictures, Vantage, Home Ent.) are redesigned in a tasty brushed-metal and pixel font ensemble. I like the Paramount Newswire, which feels like an RSS feed clicking thru to the News section. I wish the clickthru provided more than the just the same headline. The homepage has the usual dominant/subordinate promos for films in rotation - again, nicely done and completely in Flash. Each film has a tickets link which can be overlooked by more studios than one would think.

A real eye catcher is what feels like video down near the bottom of the page. It is a rotating promo for their "Trailer Park"; a collection of current and upcoming trailers in one spot for easy viewing and sorting. I love this page, but wonder why it isn't included in the main nav since the trailer remains a film's strongest asset.

The Studio section is in the main nav and provides a comprehensive resource for industry information about the studio and its executive team. Mobile aggregates mobile downloads, Games offers games (I'm guessing most were created for movie sites), and On Demand shows a new emphasis on Pay Per View viewing with zip-code look-up. I think we'll see more studios outwardly promoting PPV like this now.

Overall, a huge improvement from the last design. Definitely modernizing the delivery of promotional content. A few bugs to be worked out (Advanced Search looks awesome, but doesn't return results for "Braff" - star of a current film...), but I'm sure they'll fix it in post.

Posted by Kirk Skodis at 10:49 PM | Permalink

Fox Atomic snuck in a redesign last weekend behind my back! It's a huge improvement in design, function, content and available ad space.

I started this blog last July with a post about their ComicCon-timed launch, so I was excited to see how it is evolving. The goal still seems to be the retention of young, single-film audiences at a destination website offering a content-bridge to hold their interests between releases. I love the idea, but am confused about where all the "community" went between the launch and this redesign. I signed up for the Digital Locker, but only got a "stay-tuned" email. I was hoping this would be the community part, but signing-in gives me no extra benefits (that I can tell).

That said, this is a huge undertaking and I'm confident they're just getting started and more will be revealed soon. The Daily Reports with live correspondents is fun and does a great job of integrating with links to other sites. Snackfootage is a collection of hard-to-watch disaster videos, not to be confused with Stupid Videos which is more Jackass-type fare. The Dave Hill program features a guy interviewing people at ComicCon.

Comics & Games looks like it will be a major element but is all coming soon. Contests seems to be the most interactive with The Nightmare Factory's Submit Your Nightmare, but I'm unable to pull up the Recent Nightmares to read the entries.

Each Fox Atomic film gets its own page with a gallery and links to sites and trailers. I wonder if anyone will be confused by the fact that regular Fox and Searchlight films are featured here. I get it, but will John Q. Teen? Will he care? Prolly not. I'm guessing these pages might be more fleshed out in the future. The film they're pushing the hardest is Turistas and I have to say the MySpace page for that film is one of the best I've seen. Nevermind that it's mostly coming soon, it fits SO well in the awkward MySpace template that you forget it's an MS page. Kudos to the creative team.

Overall, I still applaud the studio's effort to do something smart and value-added for the studio site. I miss the community elements but I'm hopeful they're in the pipeline. The video-masher Blender is still promised, but what of the recent Yahoo! acquisition of Jumpcut, the partner creating Blender? Stay tuned...

Posted by Kirk Skodis at 1:52 PM | Permalink

This changes everything.

Posted by Kirk Skodis at 2:27 PM | Permalink