One of the great things about SXSW is (wait for it, wait for it, buzzword ahead) the synergy of it. Events like this morning’s panel, Pimp My Film Website, where film makers learned more about this webernet thing.
If this sounds, in this post-The Blair Witch ARG-fired era, obvious stuff, moderator Tim Nolan of Firstborn Studio asked for a show of hands. The result was about 50-50 techies/film makers, which Nolan said almost never happened. Film makers are not interactive designers who are live their life around industry-defined best practices: they’re working on the best film they can make.
Quick tips from Nolan: the nice, simple, clean website you built to attract investors won’t sell your movie to viewers. For those of you behind the lens who don’t have time or resources (or the techy friends) to build up a kick-ass website, then take advantage of the tools that are there, like Flickr and MySpace. Plus, Flash is your friend. And don’t forget: you’re creating lots of content anyway (your film, the scripts, cast bios), so this is just putting it in a different, non-scary format.
He also pointed out that it’s surprisingly quick and easy to take a mediocre movie website and turn it into something pimpalicious (thus, the panel name.) To prove this, he took the original very vanilla website for The Marconi Brothers, tweaked what was there, and turned it into something much more appealing. In three days. Nice. What may have been nicer was that director Marco Ricci said that he’d thought making a website was a pain that he’d just left to a very kind friend as an afterthought, and now realized that it was a pretty simple process.
The Marconi Brothers, screens at 6:30pm, Friday March 14, at the Alamo Lamar.
This article appears in March 7 • 2008.
