We’ve been working on a local film festival and trying to get materials to promote the films. This shouldn’t be too difficult- wrong.
Movie after movie has a site built in Flash- with no way to easily get the images or synopsis that would make promoting a movie easy. Even finding the films “Official site” is next to impossible- and that’s even with the amazing resource of IMDB.com
So- a few tips to independent film makers (and maybe even some major film distributors):
- Have searchable content- that means the viewer should be able to select and copy your text.
- Have your film logo available as an .eps, or .ai, or even in a pdf, in case someone wants to use it to promote your film.
- Have high resolution still photos from your film- for print articles about the film. Make sure you tag them so Google images can find them too- include names of stars, the name of the movie, not image001.jpg (it doesn’t hurt to have a stuffed/zip file for the complete press kit)
- Keep your site up-to-date with news and showings. Flash makes this more difficult- a blog makes this easy.
- Provide information that reviewers would find useful on the site: bio’s of actors, writers, the history that goes with your film.
- Have film clips and trailers available in multiple resolutions- in a universal format. We prefer Quicktime, but, what ever you do- don’t embed them so we can’t use them on our promotional site.
- Have your contact information available. If the film is available in subtitled form, make sure you have the site in each language.
- Make sure you update your IMDB.com entry with your official site link.
The Next Wave can build you a very effective site, for a lot less than what these fancy Flash sites are costing- and get you better search position. But, this really isn’t being written to be a sales pitch- it’s written out of frustration because we can’t get what we need to promote a film festival.