Group Workbook - Promotion and Web 2.0
Written by Lucy Bonner-Smith

Supporting material for the documentary and ways to promote it, such as social networking sites and documentary signatures.

Twitter

We created a Twitter account to instantly connect with the audience and also follow experts, documentary makers and companies that reflect our own ideas for the documentary. It enables us to interact with the audience and send short messages/snippets of information to the potential audience.

Youtube

We created a YouTube account for both of our productions (Documentary and Drama), to try and promote any sort of trailer, film or short that we produce. This promotional material lets the audience get a feel for our films/shorts and begin to 'know' our look. 

Flickr

Flickr is a free photo sharing website, where users are able to upload their images and gain popularity by simply using tags and keywords. All of the group have a Flickr account (click on a name to be directed to someone's Flickr account - opens in same window):

Lucy
Joe
Alex
Paul
Chris
Rosie
Matt

Wix

Wix is a website where you can create your own Flash website, and we will use this to promote our final documentary. We will also upload the teaser trailer and perhaps the overall documentary, as it is more professional to have a website solely based on the documentary itself, not including research.

This is our official Wix website.

Vimeo, withoutabox, imdb, 4docs & The Smalls

withoutabox is an "online application submission service for film festivals". We will use this website to promote our documentary by uploading our trailer, teasers, short clips of the documentary and the final documentary. However, we will use this within pre-production and the production stage to promote our trailers and teaser clips further. As a result, we hope to gain audience participation and interest through the use of withoutabox, gaining even more popularity online. 

Vimeo is a "respectful community of creative people who are passionate about sharing the videos they make". Like withoutabox.com, we will upload our trailers, teasers and final documentary on Vimeo to gain public interest. Because Vimeo allows people to distribute their products, we have also joined the 'Free HD stock footage' group, that allows us to download and use archive footage for free. 

imdb, according to the website itself, is "the biggest, best, most award-winning movie site on the planet". We signed up to this to sync with the withoutabox account, but it also gives us even more chances to gain interest and popularity. Like withoutabox and Vimeo, imdb allows us to upload trailers, clips, teasers, posters and promotional material (but for a small fee!).

4docs is where members can discuss short documentaries and upload their own documentaries to the web. It is also helpful to us because there is information regarding how to make a short documentary on a tight budget, what to upload it to and how to gain audience interaction and popularity. It's also a chance to ask questions to other filmmakers and get their advice and 'tools of the trade'. Furthermore, there are competitions for short documentaries, which helps get our documentary noticed. 

The Smalls is an online showcase for short films and music, which, like withoutabox, vimeo, imdb and 4docs gives the oppurtunity to upload our documentary to their website, increasing audience participation, also with the oppurtunity to get work commissioned.

Zoomerang & Yahoo! Ask

Zoomerang is an online questionnaire source and software, used to get results from polls and surveys. We will use this to ask the audience questions in pre-production, such as: 

This will help audience participation and interest leading up to the documentary, and gain popularity.

We have also launched a survey to find out information about our audience demographic, who would be interested in the documentary and why they find our documentary idea interesting.

Yahoo! Answers, like Zoomerang, let's us ask questions to potential audiences, but unlike Zoomerang, the respondents can reply back with comments, interacting with us and describing why they answered like they did. This gives us personal audience participation with potential spectators and also helps us gather what the audience want out of our documentary. 

T-Shirts

I have also signed the group up the the UK real life superheroes registry. This is our official account. This way, we can contact and interact with the UK real life superheroes and get involved further into what they are planning and their events.  

Fonts

To maximise continuity within our promotional materials, the fonts used correlate to each other. For example, on this website, the font is 'Trebuchet MS', which is also the font used on the back of the t-shirts. The logo font is called 'catman', created by mgmuranaka on dafont.com. We have express written permission to use the font as a logo and as a design on our t-shirts.

Meta Tags

Meta tags are used in websites to be able to easily search and access specific websites someone is looking for using keywords and tags. With these tags in place, when someone searches with keywords along the lines of our documentary, our website will be rated higher in search engines like Google and Yahoo!.

Production Group Email Address

Using a production group email address gives a sense of professionalism, especially when the audience/contacts want to talk with us personally.