COMMUNICATIONS LAB ASSIGNMENT 1 DOCUMENTATION
Project Name: Lollywood Ltd.
Project Description: The project is an assignment for the Communications Lab class where we had to write, act and film a short video as part of the 30 Minute Film Festival. We were then required to create a website using HTML, CSS and JavaScript which featured that video. Our video was a 30 second film which ended with a cliffhanger when a criminal barges into the house of three sisters who are preparing to go to a wedding. As soon as the three sisters realize the presence of an intruder, they pick up the nearest object lying around them and rush to fight him. This is where the video ends and the viewer is left curious as to what happens next.
Process: As the video was made with the sole purpose of creative story-telling, I decided to design my website as a film studio platform. The film studio is named to be “Lollywood Ltd.” and the 30MFF video is featured on the landing page of the website as the trailer for their soon-to-be-released film called “Intruder”. The general theme of the website revolves around action-packed films mainly of the following genres: family, drama, romance, action and thriller. As Lollywood Ltd. is shown to be one of the oldest and most well-established film studios of the Middle East, a golden color pallet was used to emphasize antiquity and royalty. This is also further depicted by using movie posters from the 20th Century instead of the 21st to show that Lollywood Ltd. has existed for decades now. Below the top trending movies, a section for the most watched trailers was created to keep the viewer engaged and informed about the purpose of the site, if they haven’t figured out already. The last section on the home page is for reviews by world famous actors which shows the global recognition of our production house. On the “About” page, information about the site and the 30MFF is displayed in a question and answer format which encourages the audience to read the text instead of skipping over it. The “Team” page was designed to allow the audience to meet the team behind Lollywood Ltd. and then contact us by leaving any message that they might have for us through the “Contact” page. The audience can also access any of our contact information - email, phone number and social media handles through the information in the website footer.
Reflection/Evaluation: The overall content that I decided to display on my website remained more or less the same. However, there were some major changes in my design as compared to what I had designed in my wireframe. I noticed that my initial layout did not really bring about the theme of my website so I decided to add film posters in the background wherever I could to emphasize that the website depicts a film studio. After completing the final version of my website, I came to like my web page a lot more considering I had almost no prior experience with HTML, CSS and JavaScript before. In terms of the functionalities of these programming languages, it definitely became much easier to understand and implement them by the end of the website. The biggest challenge for me was to come up with a story for the website and to decide on consistent designs, graphics and color themes. It took a lot of trial and error and thorough feedbacks from my Professor to reach a satisfactory layout and color scheme. The process overall taught me a lot of new concepts and I now feel much more confident in my knowledge of everything that I have learned so far.