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Getting and Using Pictures |
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Where's your press photographer?We rarely take pictures of the film making process. Pros take hundreds - each day. Every club should appoint a photographer. You do have a small team shooting a "Making of " for all club films, don't you? (It's a great help for critiquing technique and generating images to promote the finished film on the website.) Your photographer should be there too.
Record club meetings. A lot happens in speech, but keep an eye out
for facial expressions: "Pat is perplexed by chromakey", "Jo covets
that tripod
" and so on. 95% of such pictures will not be used,
but the remainder may be gems. |
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Pictures never lie ... duh!Aim to make the images look great. Feel free to adjust brightness, contrast, colour saturation and sharpness. Zoom in on interesting details or crop the image. Consider blurring the background and cutting out exit signs, trees or chimneys. Try to have only a couple of different picture sizes on a website. Frame grab from Rent-a-Mate by Nigel Barton. The film's image quality is excellent. Nevertheless the brightness, contrast, colour saturation and sharpness of version have all been tweaked to do justice to the movie. |
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How use pics on a pageDon't just scatter them at random on a page. Choose where to put them. Some images look better on the left, others on the right.
If the
picture shows someone looking right, flying a paper aeroplane to the right
(our still is from The Lecture) or a vehicle going left to right
the picture looks better on the left of the page. DividersA practical use of pictures is to use them as page dividers as well as illustrations ... a trick we sometimes use in this series. Aim to have at least one picture per web page. They add a warmth and interest to a mass of text. Galleries and Slide ShowsSome web design programs allow you to create a gallery of pictures. Tiny images appear like a page of stamps and when you click on one that inage is shown full-size. Other tools let you add a slide show where a series of pictures appear one after the other.
Either approach might be used to display portraits of your members or shots from a film. |
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Keep still!Our final plea: on your website do not have images which move, apart from embedded videos. Animated gifs of a running film projector, flash movies and so on may be technically clever but wear their welcome out very fast indeed. The first time you see a site opening with an old-time movie countdown is fun, the second time tedious ... and chances are you will not visit a third time. |
Pictures as LinksYou can make an image into a hyperlink so that people clicking on it go somewhere else. It might take them from a postage stamp sized photo to a larger version of the same picture, for example. You can also use pictures of arrows and buttons, making them links but it is always good practice to have a text link alternative somewhere on the page. |
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Website Makeover Guides - Introduction
What Should the Content Be? |
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Getting Pictures |
Getting & Using
Pictures A Beginner's Guide to Creating a Club Website with Weebly
Don't Panic! |
Signing up to Weebly |
Making your first (elegant) page
| Adding more pages and
navigation |