My good friend and occasional writing partner Mike Chenoweth (more familiarly known in these parts as “Chenopup”) has just launched a nifty entrepreneurial venture, a company called Reel Classroom, which will produce and sell educational DVDs targeted at those who want to become film and video professionals, as well as those who are already in the business and want to deepen their skill sets. The first two DVDs — Introduction to Lighting for Film and Video and Green Screen Lighting — are available now.
Both were written, directed, and edited by Mike, and they feature veteran gaffer Carl Gundestrup as your host and narrator. I’ve seen both DVDs myself, and think they’re pretty interesting, even for people who have no intention of ever becoming gaffers or lighting techs. (Full disclosure: I actually appear on-screen in Green Screen Lighting, in all of my difficult-to-light glory!)
The Reel Classroom web site is live as of yesterday, so I’d like to ask my three loyal readers to do me a favor: click on over there and have a look around, see if there’s anything there you might like for yourself, and generally do what you can to spread the word. If you know anyone who might be interested in learning about the film industry, let them know.
Well, I’m not in the film industry, so I’m not likely to light anything anytime soon. That said, I AM in the web application management business, so I do have a few basic comments on the website:
1) Set all the borders on your images to zero. The two DVD cases on the home page (and the first two on the product page) have BORDER=1, so you get that blue (purple after you’ve clicked) border around them. The “More Info” buttons on both of those pages also have BORDER=1 right now.
2) You should put your menu choices near the top of the screen. Right now, with the advertisement on top, they are almost directly in the middle and very easy to miss (I missed them the first time I looked). If you want them below the advertisement as well, then you can always put them in both places.
3) The Contact Us link should go to a web form, where someone can fill out a bunch of information, including “comments” and then have the form send the e-mail to you. Two reasons: 1) it avoids the e-mail program opening in front of your webpage, which distracts the viewer, and 2) with some basic form development, you can track stats on who requested feedback, how often, what they wanted, etc.
4) The FAQ page should be in Question and Answer format (just a convention, given that FAQ stands for Frequently Asked Questions). Also, the site’s e-mail address is an image, rather than text. This is usually done by individuals to avoid getting spammed by search engines that are scouring the web for strings with an “@” in the middle of them. In the case of a business, though, you WANT your e-mail address to get picked up by the search engine filters. It’s worth managing a little spam to have a Google search of “Reel Classroom” bring back that e-mail address…
One other, non-website related thought: while I’m not a filmmaker, I have been spending a lot of time lately editing films (home movies, etc.) using Photoshop Elements (I’m sure there are lots of tools like this). Has Cheneopup considered doing some videos on editing, that can be used by (or perhaps even directed toward?) the home video crowd? Just a thought…
Good luck, Cheno!