No More Flash Movie Websites
More and more frequently, filmmakers ask me for feedback on their film websites, and I keep seeing the same thing: heavy, multimedia sites built on Flash. I keep seeing site navigation all in a full-screen image representing some iconic place in the film; animations of design elements flying or fading in on every page; music playing automatically; long loading screens; and the dreaded splash pages. This seems to have become the standard. Hollywood does it. (See: Beowulf, Lions for Lambs, American Gangster.) The indies do it. (e.g. Margot at the Wedding, Eagle vs. Shark, Weirdsville). It’s awful, and it’s so Web 1.0.
We are well beyond denying that a film website is the most effective and often the only entry point to discovery of your film. The audience has to jump an increasingly absurd number of hurdles to see your movie in the theater. The website is an opportunity to introduce the film as quickly as possible, provide the detailed information your audience and the media are looking for, to engage your audience repeatedly, and to make it ridiculously easy for fans to promote your film for you.
Below, I’m going to explain why this ancient model fails and suggest a few starting points for an alternative approach.
Why Flash sites fail
- Flash sites are heavy and slow. It takes extra time to download and process all those big graphics and sounds, and you can’t afford to make the casual web browsing fan wait. Many of them may be browsing on computers a few years old or spotty wi-fi connections. That “loading” progress bar isn’t part of your story, is it? Nobody likes it.
- Flash sites give your site a non-standard interface. Where did the right-click menu go? How do you copy text to the clipboard? Where does that link go? Does it open in another window? What does the “back” button do? Where the hell is the button that stops that loud music? Nobody wants to re-learn how to browse the web just for your little movie.
- Flash is not searchable. If you do it right, many visitors will find your site through a search engine. With Flash, that all disappears. It also prevents searching within the browser.
- Most of these sites don’t allow deep-linking. That’s the trade-off for not having to reload the whole flash file every time you go to a different section. This is important for encouraging links to your content. See if you can find a direct link to the trailer on the Lions for Lambs site.
- Flash can’t be syndicated. RSS and Atom feeds are becoming increasingly important as easy tools for people to follow your updates through news readers, such as Google Reader.
- Those animations keep repeating. They’re cool the first time, but don’t make me watch your menu fly in every time I go to another section of your site.
- You’re tied to your designer. Most Flash sites don’t allow you to easily change around your interface without going back to the busy, expensive Flash contractor you hired to build your site. What if you want to change one little menu item? Or even redesign the entire layout without losing all the content? Even another Flash expert could have a hard time tracking down the original source files and scripts. Same goes for jpg image map interfaces.
- Most Flash sites, like the examples cited above, give the impression that the site is finished forever, that there’s no reason to keep coming back for new content. Even if there’s a news section, it’s much harder and more expensive to implement in Flash than in other HTML-based options.
- No need to re-invent the wheel. Web browsers are good at laying out text and images and performing all the functions that go along with it. Flash requires you to re-implement all that, and more often than not you’re not gonna cover all the bases.
That’s not to say that you can’t solve any of the above problems within a Flash-based framework, but it’s a lot harder.
Easy Alternatives
Set your film site up as a blog. It’s that simple. They’re searchable, deep-linkable, syndicate-able, re-designable, subscribe-able, modular and allow easy user interaction through comments. Get yourself WordPress on your own server or on theirs. You can also try Livejournal, Blogger or Moveable Type. For the most part, they’re all free. Do a comparison.
Most blogging software will double as a content management system. So even if your main purpose is not to blog, you can easily set up fixed pages to give the basic information about your film. You may still need help from an expert to fully customize your layout, but they all come with multiple themes that should be enough to get you started.
See Four Eyed Monsters as an example. There are some things I would do differently if I had it to do over again, but for the most part, the site was a success. I wish I knew more examples of film sites that I like. If you know of some, please comment on this post.
When Flash is okay
There are some things that Flash is much better at than HTML, and I encourage using it for those specific purposes. The best example is for embedded media players, such as YouTube or any of the countless other video hosting sites. There are also good embedded audio players, like the one in the Audio Player WordPress plugin. (See it in action on Lance’s site.) Flash is also great for games or animation, as on Homestar Runner.
The other reasons I think it works so well in those situations are that the non-standard interface is within a confined space of the specific media player and because the specific, compartmentalized rich-media experience makes it worth waiting for the download. (More on that another time.) Otherwise, lose it.
This entry was posted on Friday, November 9th, 2007 at 12:08:28 pm and is filed under Articles, Business, Movies, Tech. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.
on Friday 11.09.07 at 4:54:05 pm Nathan wrote:
THANK YOU.
Not only do I absolutely agree with your opinion on the matter, this is well-written and includes some stuff I didn’t know before.
Hey, look at that – a well-thought out, clearly presented *blog*. Be still my beating heart.
Bookmarking and sharing this bad boy. Thanks for taking the time to write it.
Cheers,
Nathan
on Friday 11.09.07 at 5:38:47 pm A-Game wrote:
Our boy’s all growns up. He’s growns up and hes growns up.
Nice post.
A
on Friday 11.09.07 at 6:30:36 pm ArinCrumley.com » Blog Archive » Meta Data for Film Websites and the Flash Design Question wrote:
[...] Chirls just posted a great blog post about web design for indie films and how Flash should really not be the design platform even if it is used for video playback and [...]
on Friday 11.09.07 at 7:05:52 pm Zach Mortensen wrote:
Brian, nice article. I can’t agree with you more. I can only say it time and again. It’s flashy, but it isn’t right for your movie.
zach
on Friday 11.09.07 at 7:12:29 pm zach mortensen wrote:
Here’s a few film websites we’ve designed using wordpress:
http://magicsoapbox.com
http://www.constantinessword.com
http://www.hardroadhome.org
http://www.gerrymanderingmovie.com
http://roadthemovie.com
http://www.goodbyebabymovie.com
on Friday 11.09.07 at 9:44:47 pm Flash-Based Websites Suck. « Andrew A. Peterson and Ramping Up wrote:
[...] Chirls recently put together a list of reasons not to use Flash as your main [...]
on Saturday 11.10.07 at 12:34:24 am Linda Nelson wrote:
You are so right about all this. Why won’t anyone listen to me when I tell them all these things? I just took over a film that has a flash website and I have to redo the site. I’m going to turn it into a php site. I want something I can update easily, without programming and I want search engines to love it. Like you said – Flash is fine for video players, but that’s about it. I learned this the hard way. My first two movie sites were flash and they took so long to load, no one stayed on the sites – probably most people didn’t even wait for them to load. Now these old sites are buried as embeds in my old site and still no one waits for them to load.
on Wednesday 11.21.07 at 8:13:37 am Ajay Rai wrote:
This is encouraging news. I have been researching the possibilities of using web2.0 tools to launch my own project to bring together activist filmmakers and grass-roots NGO’s. Last week I decided to build the online community around WordPress. Just last night, at an Own-it event, I learned of “Where Are the Joneses?” a Ford branding project, which also uses WordPress as the backbone of their website.
AJ
iDOCs …Create the Change
on Thursday 11.22.07 at 6:03:59 am DefogMyBlog wrote:
I absolutely agree. Any of us who have been through the process of getting a website built know how much quicker it is to get a blog up and running and how flexible it is. Typepad Pro is excellent and is hosted. Also on request your site can be hosted in the UK which may influence Google rankings.
Niamh Kiernan
on Friday 11.23.07 at 7:49:08 am Larry wrote:
I agree a little, ONLY A LITTLE.
Four Eyed Monsters , for example is a terrible web site! Yes it loads fast, so what, it is boring and does not induce any interest in buying the DVD. Flash is bad for almost any website, I agree, except a film web site…come on..it is a film! It is like having a music website without any music playing in the background..why? First impressions are important, boring web site = borning film, in most peoples minds. People expect a film site to load slow AND WILL WAIT for it too load. If a film web site looks like a news blog or newspaper, it has not hit it’s mark.
Hollywood has one thing the author of this site does not… creative talent and 50 years experience marketing their films. A Blog site might be easy to change and load fast, but tells the visitor one thing… you lake creative confidence in your film. Sorry..flash is the only way to go with a film site, link a blog if you want, but forget flash and watch your film go into the toilet…period.
In response to: zach mortensen above, the sites you linked really suk big time.. come on man…are these film sites selling their creative films or medical perscriptions? BORING!! It appears to me, all the posts above are made by people who are not in the film industry or have ANY experience marketing afilm (except me), it is what I do and do it well. If I do not design a flash site for a film, it is an average visitor time on less than 3 seconds, flash film sites average over 3 minutes each.. you tell me, what will sell the film in the end? I rest my case.
Now why don’t all those who posted above go back to what you do best…. helping the simple people with their boring websites..leave the real marketing to the experts, who really know what they are doing, and have the multi-million dollar budgets to do it.
on Sunday 12.09.07 at 12:02:17 am JM wrote:
Flash is so old, man. But I always hated it anyways as it is way over used.
on Friday 02.15.08 at 6:46:05 am jim wrote:
Dear Larry,
All this shows is you hollywood and the film industry has its head up its ass… the only reason people come to flash sites for 3 min is cus it takes that long to load, fathem the poor interface and then close the bloody thing. Besides most film sites are shrines to the film, visited by fans of the film – not good for new markets i bet.
Its fine for kids but not beyond that – i dont want a crap web representation of the film (which is what the sites try to be) as i will watch the film to see the “good bits” not see a poorly emulated CG FX on a web site that took 3min to load and is not comparible to pre rendered 25fps DVD Video. Yes show screen shots and have headders using the styling from the film to add identity but beyond that its trash. Then thats like most of the films, what content/issue do they realy support (bar the “green issues” yawn)? nothing you would want to investigate or take further as its all so shallow. so in a way your right films dont actualy need a web site they just need to get the attention for the now and the only way they know how is to try and make a more flashy web site than the last one – personaly i don’t realy give a dam if you manage to program my mouse cursor to look like micky mouse cus im not 8 (evon if my grammer and spelling betrays otherwize).
on Friday 02.22.08 at 4:00:10 pm PSPerkins wrote:
I have to agree with comments made in this post. Mr. Hollywood up there is just dead flat wrong. Flash websites are like back seat drivers – I prefer to do the driving myself. I am much more impressed by a robust php site or hell – even just plain old static html – than I am with a flash movie. I see nothing wrong with any of the sites in those links above that Zach posted. They are informative and serve their purpose faithfully. I believe that the most important rule for web design is “form follows function.” Forget this rule and all is lost. We end up with a big, presumptuous, pretentious and RUDE internets that nobody wants to use any more. Flash has it’s place.
FORM FOLLOWS FUNCTION.
on Sunday 07.18.10 at 8:59:36 am J wrote:
Chris, first of all, I’d like to say this is a really great article.
But in my personal opinion, I think movie sites should be built in Flash if and only if it’s a really big movie. Because people will visit it anyway no matter what technology it is built with. Take Harry Potter or Transformers for example. In one way or another, the fans have to somehow feel like and experience that it is somewhat like an extension of the film. Can you actually imagine a Harry Potter or Transformers site that is plain, square or flat? Although I’m hoping that in the future, with the advancement of technology, we are able to view these sites without having to look at a preloader.
I do think that we can build movie sites in plain HTML or WP if these movie sites are indies since these movies need to get their names out there. But for a movie that stars, say, Julia Roberts, I don’t think building a site that is non-SEO friendly will hurt their sales. Take Twilight for example. They have a Full Flash site but they’re earning millions even during the first few days of their release. If they built a plain HTML or WP website, what good is it going to do? Is it going to bring in more millions? What will it contribute? My 12-year old niece will go see Twilight because Robert Pattinson is in it. Not because it passed W3C standards. And when she sees their website, she is more drawn into the film.
However, if Twilight didn’t make it big the first time, I do think they should build it in plain HTML. But since that didn’t happen, I do like to keep it animated like it is now.
That’s just my two cents. I’d like to hear your thoughts :)
on Sunday 07.18.10 at 9:01:41 am J wrote:
Oops sorry, I mean Brian. For some reason, I read Chirls as Chris. Sorry about that :)
on Wednesday 07.21.10 at 1:33:27 am chirls wrote:
Thanks for the comments, J. But I’d like to counter two of your assumptions.
The first assumption is that one cannot build a site that is not “plain, square or flat” with open technologies. Most of the visual tricks you see on those bloated Flash sites can be accomplished with HTML and Javascript, and the open technologies that are built into the browsers discourage the bloat and delays. (Google has proven that slow sites drive users away.) With the HTML5 upgrades that are available in most browsers today, including iPhone, iPad and Android devices, you can really do some crazy stuff, not to mention the further advances that will become available in the next year or two. Keep an eye on Mozilla Drumbeat to see what filmmakers and other artists are developing with HTML5.
Even with the browsers available two and a half years ago when I wrote this post, open tools made it easier to build social features into a site, which I would argue are far more interesting and engaging than visual bells and whistles.
The second assumption with which I take issue is that big movies can take their audiences for granted. Even with a big, fat marketing budget, there’s always room to get more bang for your buck. And the idea that big films are immune to the same attention competition that’s affecting independent film just isn’t true. Remember, this year’s memorial day weekend box office was the worst in 17 years. The studios and major distributors are still trying alchemy – throw huge piles of money out and hope for the best. Websites that fail to honor audiences’ limited time and attention make up one of many examples of how Hollywood is clinging to obsolete techniques for marketing and storytelling.
Did I miss anything?
on Monday 07.26.10 at 8:05:30 pm chirls wrote:
I think this fellow, Dan Wineman, does a much better job of getting the point across.
Read the entire original post.
on Friday 07.30.10 at 4:14:45 am John wrote:
Brian, you just made me think otherwise ;) Cheers!