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Writer's picture17amymay.kelley

#13: Biutiful

Updated: Aug 3, 2018

Production: Focus Films and Cha Cha Cha Films

Distribution: Optimum Releasing

Genre: Romance/Drama

Synopsis: Uxbal (Javier Bardem), a career criminal, plies his trade in Barcelona's underground sweatshops and back alleys. Unlike his associates, he has some respect for the poor workers under his thumb and is a devoted father. Told that he is ill with prostate cancer, and has just a few months to live, Uxbal tries to get his affairs in order before the spirits, with whom he communes, come to claim him.



Website: http://biutiful-themovie.com/


The website for this movie is very conventional, cited by the opening home page the link directs you to. There is a gallery at the top which directs you to sub-pages of the site, and it has smaller photos, as if to give the audience an insight into the containments of that page. However, this may also have the dual utility of having a stylistically intriguing effect, henceforth arousing an audience's attention and diverting it towards the photo-gallery as the visual aspect seems to take prevalence here.


The image in the forefront, underneath the copy, alternates via sliding images. This is something I would like to do as it obtains and keeps an audience's interest; the implications of this is that it is not a younger audience who may get bored/dissatisfied easily, yet it is not too busy nor requires no specialist knowledge. This guides the target audience for the film towards the late 30s, early 40s. The movie is evidentially driven by pragmatic purposes in lieu of an artistic aspect.


This is because it is stylised, but the focus is on the activity of the page. For example, the aforementioned gallery at the top is easily viewable and accessible, and the button 'Watch Trailer' stands out slightly due to it's red background and white font, which is a link to take you directly to said trailer. This, perhaps due to the intended older audience, is to lessen confusion, as effectively by keeping it simple it can echo the movie's message of less is more, which is all about stripping humanity back to it's basics in the face of something terrible.




Directing myself to the 'Photos' (or, 'Fotos') segment, there are instant appeals to a Prosumer, a theorist category coined by Clay Shirky as the behind-the-scenes footage again, acts as the aforementioned reward audiences gratify from as they have actively sought out the website to rveal more information than Mainstreamer's, or casual viewers may recieve from a green band trailer shown on television.


Something I will borrow from this is the clear distinction that the movie is constructed; the behind the scenes footage/evidence acts as a support-beam for the website as a whole and generally gives it that authentic movie website feel aswell as crediting those who have worked on the movie. This crediting can also be seen below on every page with the billing block, which for legal requirements will have to be part and parcel of myproduction. This, as it is commonly seen on DVD cases, will also create the illusion of a movie website as the two are intrinsically linked.


Another consistency I would like to attempt is the film's logo on every page; it's easily recognisable and well-established as it is placed highest up on the page and on the left side of the page, and as this is the first thing people will see, the movie's name will become subject to the Cultivation Theory and become memorable for the audience. The sizing of it in Bitiuiful's website is perhaps a little too intrusive, but I will alter mine to be smaller yet undoubtedly present. A good idea for my logo would be for it to link back to the home-page.


Navigatory-wise, this website page is very self-explanatory and will be something I integrate into my own work as the main and delegated pages will have to be easily accessible and clearly labelled as this is majorly a website for audience's pleasure, not for a complicated challenge. As a convention, the main navigation point is allocated to be placed along of the top of the page, either to the right of the logo or below the logo. I will not include lots of pages here, and may have some sub-pages to give the website a more in-depth feel, as though there are lots of informationary pages on things such as characters, etc. The sub-pages are intended to compact and compartmentalise subjects of interest to prevent users from being overwhelmed with the given content, and to help them find what they’re looking for more easily.


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