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MakingOfTheGrudge2

http://ghosthousepictures.comingsoon.net

I came across this site when searching for webisodes, and I thought it was quite a cool idea. Basically what they've done is quite simply taken their 'making of' type documentary and put it online, which makes a lot more sense in some ways than putting it solely as a feature on the DVD. I haven't really seen this done before, so I thought I'd talk a bit about it.

The advantages of the online format for "making of" style documentaries about a film are pretty obvious. First of all its very easy to choose which part of the documentary one might want to view. Click the pull down menu, choose your subject, and there it goes. DVD menus are so annoying, so I found this to be quite an advantage.

Secondly, I saw something in one of the 'webisodes' that i found interesting, and I wanted to research more on it. Takashi Shimizu, the Director makes really cool staoryboards, and I wanted to see If I could find more examples of his sketches. I simply paused the 'webisode', and googled his his storyboard art. I think that was a great advantage. I dont usually do that when I'm watching a 'making of' documentary on a DVD. This was almost like approaching a wikipedia searching experience except instead of linking, I had to do my own search. But wouldnt it be awesome if the links just appear on the same page as the movie is playing. Or perhaps if i click on the movie screen at that particular frame, it would pause the movie and take me to a list of links to his storyboards. That would be a great way to format something like this.

The screen size seems to be big enough to get the right amount of information into the documentary. About 5-10 percent of the documentary are scenes from the movie, so its really about showing an example of the filmmaking results, rather than trying to get the viewer to engage with the story. There's no way I could actually watch the real movie at this size, but we dont really watch this type of thing for the story. We watch it for the information.

Another reason that this format is more suitable than the DVD format is that who really wants to watch a documentary about the making of the film straight after they've just watched the film? I mean usually the only time we would really do that is when we own the DVD, or have a very specfic interest in how something in the film was made. But watching it straight after seems like it would ruin the experience. Its possible people are watching the extras on DVD more often these days because of the Netflix unlimited rental time. But I know I'd prefer to send my DVD back ASAP so I can get my next one, and watch the DVD extras online.

Does this advertise the movie well? Who cares? I havent seen the movie. Do I want to see it anymore now that Ive seen the documentary? No. But I did see the original Japanese movie (only The Grudge, not The Grudge 2), and I thought it was pretty stupid. But for someone who like these sort of things, maybe it would be enticing. The positive side to it is that it can't be doing them any harm. They made the documentary anyway (as they seem to do with most big films these days), why not throw it up online for people to find. This is a great strategy, and more movies should be doing it.

I think this online format for the 'making of' documentary is a great idea, but it still needs to take more advatage of the medium. Most viewers are quite specific in what they want to get out of such a documentary, so more linking and video player options should be implemented in the future to enhance this interactive video excperience. Searchablity is the key to the online medium, especially for shows that are all about the information, as in the documentary. So what we lose in unneeded screensize should be made up for in complexity of information delivery.