An update to an earlier post on the Tristram Shandy sites: Urgent Pipe Dream not only grokked the whole thing, but found my portfolio and connected me with them by name.

Kind of amusing the author assumes we have a whole agency instead of, well, just my boss and me. Thanks for the honest critique, and especially the kind words on the “real” movie site.

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Written by Chad Ossman

www.thenotoriousbettiepage.com

The official site for the Picturehouse film The Notorious Bettie Page. Not quite as highly conceptual as either Tristram Shandy site, my idea here was just to reflect the design of contemporary girlie magazines seen in the film. See if you can spot my Photoshopping on one of the Gretchen Mol images to appease the MPAA censors.

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Written by Chad Ossman

www.tristramshandymovie.com/site

The official site for the Picturehouse film Tristram Shandy: A Cock & Bull Story. A bargain for Picturehouse: two movie sites for the price of one. This new “real” movie site accompanies an already-launched elaborate meta-joke conceived of and written by my boss. This one is more my baby: an extended English-major wank.

The first attracted a little blog action: Entertainment Weekly Popwatch and Digital Hive. Unfortunately, neither blogger appears to have discovered the second site. Either they didn’t spot it, or the first site vastly overshadows it. The former is certainly clever & unique, and deservedly gets the attention, but I think the latter would do better if not deliberately “hidden” as an Easter Egg behind one obscure link. Together they are the most technically complex and demanding sites I’ve ever designed & built, so I’m happy with any attention they get.

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Written by Chad Ossman

www.TristramShandyMovie.com

The first of two sites for the excellent Michael Winterbottom film. On one level Tristram Shandy: A Cock & Bull Story is an adaptation of the 18th Century novel The Life and Opinions of Tristram Shandy: Gent. Take a step back, and on another level it’s about an English film crew shooting an adaptation of the 18th Century novel The Life and Opinions of Tristram Shandy: Gent. Take in account many of the actors play versions of themselves, and the whole thing quickly becomes… well, all postmodern ‘n’ shit.

So my boss had brilliant idea: in addition to a “normal” movie promotional site, we would create an imaginary version of my computer desktop. So you can read my email, check out discarded designs in the trash can, etc. We thought it would be self-explanatory, but worried people have actually been calling & emailing Picturehouse that something has gone wrong with their computers and their emails are on the web. So I guess I must have done my job well! It’s a trick to make a fake yet functional Windows desktop using a Mac, believe me. It utilizes practically every single thing I know about Flash.

But necessary to the joke is a “real” movie site. So Picturehouse gets two sites out of me for the price of one. But that’s all good, because I’ve really entertained myself by translating 21st Century internet-ese into jokey 18th Century language. Shhh… here’s the work in progress.

A subject worthy of a college paper: we’ve taken to calling the first a “fake” movie site, complete with actual scare quote gestures made with our fingers. But here’s the poseur: we’ve also found ourselves doing the same with the “real” site. So, don’t they sort of cancel each other out?

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Written by Chad Ossman

Finally the penny drops. WBShop.com Version II launches today, after several years (!!!) of development.

Waaaay back in 2001, not long after starting at New Line, I got the opportunity to design the official Warner Bros. online store (long story short: it replaced the failed brick ‘n’ mortar stores). It was a huge marquee name for my portfolio, and way beyond my skills and experience at the time. It… uh, sucked. But I can console myself by saying that was about 4,372 years ago in web-design time.

So at some point, I don’t recall when, my boss began the ambitious project of redesigning the whole thing from top to bottom, for not just aesthetics (my department) but also functionality (not my department). As Lead Designer, my role in the project was to, well, design everything. But there are numerous sources of input, some I can debate and some I simply have to obey. There were several times when I thought my part of the job was “in the can”, only for the whole process to grind up again all over again. In the midst of all this, my colleagues were stuggling with the technical side of things (e-commerce functionality, etc). This went on for some years.

So it was a long, tough experience for me. Once upon I time I was quite pleased with it, and couldn’t wait for it to launch. But then a new E-Commerce Manager chipped in with some bullshit statistic saying that users (which some of us call “people”) were .0013% more likely to click on a red button than a blue one. Hence the red buttons. A complete violation of my color scheme, which contributed to the WB branding as well as drew the eye to the products for sale. Even worse, I did earlier versions of red buttons that were more legible and pretty, and they were nixed in favor of what you see now: $&#^$ red buttons all over the place. It may be the first web site with acne.

That’s not my only grudge. I didn’t build anything (meaning stuff like image optimization, HTML coding, etc.), which should be a good thing because I’m a designer, not a developer, Jim. But looking at how these webmonkeys chose to build it, it’s clear to me that I know more about HTML then they do and that’s just wrong. Does it take forever to load in your browser? I wash my hands.

Oh well, it’s finally up there for the whole world to see and commit commerce with. What an anti-climax.

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Written by Chad Ossman

Another movie site: Ushpizin. My early designs for this one were looking pretty good, and I felt uncharacteristically confident about them. Part of one concept survives as a computer desktop wallpaper; I actually think my title treatment is quite nice, perhaps even good enough for a movie poster. I’m not crazy about what Picturehouse came up with, but presumably their marketers know what they’re doing.

It’s such an incredible amount of work for one person to do all this. So when it came time to crank the whole thing out in Flash, I quickly lost my enthusiasm as the inevitable frustration kicked in. As usual, I hate it. But I’ll give it some time and see if I come around.

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Written by Chad Ossman

I always think every site I design is the worst ever. The most heavily compromised, the most failed in technical ambition, the most ugly. And this latest train wreck, launching today, is no exception:

The Thing About My Folks

As this is my first “new site” announcement on this blog, I think perhaps a brief cheat sheet is in order: I’m Senior Designer at New Line Cinema, which used to partly entail designing & developing movie sites for subsidiary Fine Line Features. Recently, New Line & HBO Films mashed together Fine Line & Newmarket (an independent distributor) and christened the Frankenstein child Picturehouse. All this upheaval was pretty exciting at first, but led to pretty much no change at all for me: now I just do the same kind of sites for Picturehouse.

My job is a bit unusual for the industry in that I both design and develop these movie sites virtually solo (roles typically divided, and even then usually whole teams of each). I’m far less of a developer (to oversimplify: all the technical stuff like HTML & Flash) than a designer, so I don’t always have the technical chops to realize the interactivity I imagine (I often fear I’m not the greatest designer either, but that’s a neurosis for another blog post). Additionally, developing is so bloody time-intensive that I often spend a disproportionate amount of time wrestling with Flash and cursing (literally, out loud) its inadequacies; time that I should and would rather spend on the actual design. Which, these being entertainment sites, is rather important.

To put this in perspective, I loathed and nearly disowned my previous movie site, The Year of the Yao, but now it’s looking pretty good to me. I couldn’t really care less about professional sports in the first place, and the film was a boring piece of NBA-financed promotional fluff that even ESPN would probably dismiss as weak journalism. So my motivation to make the site pretty was lacking to say the least, and yet it became one of my most well-received sites. The completion of these projects often produces gaping, yawning silence from the studio bigwigs, but I received more positive feedback on Yao than I perhaps ever did. It may have even been one of the final deciding factors that led Picturehouse to agree to letting us (well, me) design their sites. Granted, it also matters that having one salaried designer drone produce a mediocre site is commercially preferable to hiring a pricey outside firm to produce a slick one. Funny how that works, isn’t it?

This site should have been different. It’s my first for Picturehouse, and so the stakes were high and I’m really fearing I won’t live up to expectations. Now it’s out there, and I’ll have to do my best in the next few weeks to tweak it to the point where I can live with it. The movie shows signs of being a success, unlike Yao, so it’s even more important that the site be acceptable.

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Written by Chad Ossman