Unit 62: Digital Video Production for Interactive Media - Principles of Digital Video Technology

Short Films

A Short Film is much like a regular film, by is surprisingly shorter. It may be made by a smaller company or by someone who doesn't feel the need to make the film unnecessarily longer. Many websites are used to display Short Films. A popular site to find films like these is using the BBC, which displays some popular Short Films created in recent months for people to find. They know the audience, target people who'd be interested in it (such as film students and movie fans) and allow it to gauge talent of indie film creators and help further their careers, making for a useful experience in enhancing the future of the industry (especially here in Britain) and allowing the further education for students and an interesting watch for anyone watching. Other websites offer such services, such as YouTube, and all of them allow people to further a career in the industry.

Promotional Material

Promotional Material is used to advertise a film product, such as through the use of posters and interviews. The best place to find material like this would be through the producers websites, or through cinema sites, which provide material necessary to understand the basics of a film and to sell you the product. Promotional material like this typically can also help enhance a users experience on the site by providing simple ways of telling what a film will be about using the information provided. Some adverts that aren't intended to become viral videos may also be viewed as being promotional material instead of viral advertising, for example, many car adverts online will be made with the intention of becoming simple promotional material rather than a viral campaign.

Film Trailer

Another example of promotional material would be Film Trailers, which help advertise and explain a film to give it a larger reach and sell it to a wider audience, displayed via movie review and discussion site "IMDb" (Internet Movie Database), or found on YouTube, to allow people to view the trailer and description of a film or TV show to get an idea of what it is prior to watching. The website displays the trailer and information on the site so that you can find it all in one location. It generally links to other popular articles or trailers of related, similar or recent films to keep you interested in watching and finding out more about movies, helping enhance your experience on the site.

User Generated Content

The most popular and well known site that provides a User-Generated Content experience is YouTube, which tailors its recommendations to you and tries to encourage you to watch videos made by average people and sell you videos based on subjects you're interested in. This helps keep your viewing experience tailored around you and your interests to provide you more videos by creators you like and make the overall user experience much friendlier and more enjoyable. It is notable that all the videos shared on this blog post are from YouTube, which shows the massive outreach possible by the use of User Generated Content platforms like it.

Viral Marketing

In terms of advertising, there's no bigger market than selling your product to the entirety of the internet. Something that is used by billions of people across the world at all hours of the day is something that can be accessed as a perfectly viable option to spread something across the world. People will start trends, talk about and even poke fun at things that they see as being noteworthy and memorable. They may see it on websites like YouTube, posted on social media or as an advert on any other website, but once your advert is out there it's in the hands of whether or not the internet sees it as a viable option for wildly spreading across the world to be worthwhile. Impressive or humorous content typically spreads better than anything else, and so many adverts are catering towards this by trying to throw in some form of humour to get it trending on social media. In recent years, none are a finer, recent example of this than that of the viral marketing campaign for the mobile game "Game of War" which featured an interesting, repetitive and catchy sketch that managed to get the internet talking for weeks.

Games


Games as a media platform are vastly different to that of film in general as they are catered towards a much more interactive and engaging audience in general to allow people to become more of a part of a larger world, universe or experience different and unique to that of anything that can be typically experienced in the real world or even in that of a film. It's a popular topic of User Generated Content on YouTube, and can, similarly to film, be made from all sorts of people from massive multimillion companies to average guys making flash games on small time websites to get a bit of advertising money from people who want to play something quick and easy.