Studio-Site Redesign Season
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.
