Reflective Analysis

Feedback from Focus Group

The feedback which I received from the focus group was very useful as it enabled me to understand elements of the site which people liked and also elements which people disliked. For example a number of people I asked thought that the site was very easy to navigate and at no point felt confused about what buttons needed to press. I received mostly a positive response from the focus group on the topic of “Site Navigation” which means I don’t really need to improve it in anyway. An element of my website which according to the focus group which needed editing was my page transitions as they are about 4-5 seconds long and they recommended I shortened them.

I did crop the hallway transition slightly to make it shorter but hopefully It hasn't hindered the overall effect of the transition.

The current audio clips which I have implemented into the website received mostly positive feedback so I won’t be editing the sound effects which have been added to the buttons and transitions.

I also tried to think of more content to put on the merchandise page but didn't really find anything relevant or suitable. I did also revamp some of PNG icons I had implemented on my site because some of them had small sections of white on them.

Professional influences on my website

I tried to implement some cool features which I had seen when conducting research of other websites and then tried to implement them all into my “Scream 4” website. I did manage to replicate several impressive features such as a custom mouse cursor which was also animated as-well as making my own video player skins and dynamic backgrounds. One member of my focus group suggested that my version of the “Scream 4” website was indeed better than the official version. In my personal opinion I believe some of my pages are better than the official site such as my homepage and downloads page. I believe my character bio page isn't as good as the official site's bio page but I did attempt to replicate some of its features such as the easing scroll bar. I also believe my page transitions are better than the official site's transitions.

My site includes links to social networking sites such as Twitter and Facebook which are in the form of buttons on the homepage I added an effect onto these buttons so that the icon would fade into a red tint once the mouse cursor rolls over the buttons. This was an attempt to make the site more dynamic as-well as keep to the theme of the movie.

To try making my website keep to the horror theme of the movie I conducted research into other horror movie websites such as “Saw” and identified unique attributes which make the site seem “horror like”.

The “Saw” website also consisted of quite dark lighting which again is a horror like attribute which I myself have implemented into my website.

There was some negative processes which I undertook during the creation of this website for example I didn't plan my page transitions during the initial planning stage which I believe would have resulted in saving time and a better end result. I also believe the obsession with making lots of dynamic effects in after effects was also quite time consuming as the process of making something in Photoshop then editing it in after effects then finally importing it in flash consumed a lot of time which could have been used on improving the functionality of the site it also increased the file size of my website considerably.

The reason for the massive file size of my project file was because some of the images which were used in my site were initially quite large resulting in them having a high file size I then re sized them in flash which of course doesn't result in the file size of the image being reduced so I would of needed to of resized the images in Photoshop to reduce the file size but I thought this would be quite a time consuming process so I decided not to resize them.

One of the parts of the site which I’m most proud of is the hallway page transition which plays when you click on the character bio page. I like it because the transition has a 3D affect to it. The movie websites which I researched such as "Saw" and "Inception" used audio quite alot so this influenced me to implement audio wherever possible in the initial stages of creating my website I would of used more audio clips in my website but was restricted because the audio I used did boost the film size significantly.

I think the Scream 4 website has elements which I think could have been improved for example the initially homepage for the scream 4 website is quite poor and isn’t very attractive. The homepage lacks any dynamic animations and the only moving part of the site is the thumbnail of the trailer which plays once your mouse cursor rolls over it.

The “Saw” website is pretty good but lacks diversity as the effects are repeated throughout the website. Adding different effects would have made the website better in my opinion. 

The movie websites which I researched didn’t have a custom mouse cursor but I decided to implement a knife mouse cursor which has blood dripping from it. My sites navigation I believe was done pretty well as the buttons is easy to identify and the links to external websites are very easily identifiable.