Report

Explain why you chose the blog topic.

We decided to choose movie reviews as our blog topic as we believed it to be a topic that is both entertaining and can provide insight into movies from a student perspective. Many blogs exist that review movies so it isn’t as if we invented a new genre, however our perspective is what makes our blog unique compared to other blogs. Also, most of the movies we decided to review are relatively new so it is more likely that people would be interested in what we have to say about them.

What were the largest challenges with a team assignment?

With a team assignment, there are many advantages and disadvantages.

Advantages:
- more information and knowledge is focused on the issue

- A greater diversity of different ideas can be developed- better understanding and acceptance of the final decision

- members develop knowledge and skills for future use- shared responsibility of the task

- willing to take more risks

Disadvantages:

- time consuming

- disagreements may delay decisions and cause hard feelings

- one or two group members may dominate discussion

- many ideas may be forgotten if no note taking.

We can see the advantages of team work being less workload, more share responsibility – and a greater resource to pool knowledge from. The Disadvantages are not being able to see eye to eye, ideas being forgotten and of course people not getting along. I found with our group though, we had good chemistry and cohesion, we could flow our ideas and shared a similar movie taste. Group works leads to you not knowing your strength, as you'll have to work in a team. But group work allows you to find what your good at, with your group meaning you will find a better quality idea to work with.

Overall, a team assignment allowed us to share the heavy workload of creating a good blog and allowed for differing opinions making a more interesting blog.

How did you come up with the design?

We had a look at the requirements for the assignment and from there did a rough storyboard of the page. All four of us thought that it would be more natural if we could have the menu, gadgets and following on the left side, as it would be on any other web page in the known universe, but per requirements, we had to have it on the right.

With everything, we were going for a look that targeted everybody. We didn’t want to limit the audience in any way with colours or pictures that defined us in any specific way.

Header: We wanted a fairly large picture that was a collage of movie scenes and different characters but we didn’t want to steal someone else’s work, and none of us were Photoshop masters. We chose the roll of film because it summed up our random movie selection and sometimes simple is best when it comes to brand identification. We also wanted to stay away from branding our blog with characters that may minimise our audience.

Colour Scheme: We wanted fairly light colours. We didn’t want blacks or reds or any colours that made the page seem dark and brooding. We wanted a ‘happy’ colour scheme. The blue, purple and grey scheme is very neutral. A few of the other sites we are following have very black schemes which framed their intent for and highlighted the movies they blogged about.

Gadget: We went with the Youtube gadget because of our link to video. If someone know nothing about a film, they can search it in our gadget and have more of a taste.

Blog comparison:

Our blog is spread across as much of the page as possible, saving the reader from scrolling too far as this is one thing I found annoying about so many blogs. We used a divider to separate our blog content from the information on the right hand side. Also due to the two tone grey colour scheme, it is easy to dis-confuse the two sections. We used a method of posting a single picture or video link at the bottom of each blog to signify the end.

Full Moon Reviews, seemed to be mixing it content with its information. The text is centred down the page and for no real reason, it is an incredibly long page with oodles of unused space on each side of its column. The pictures are placed around the text to good effect, however due to the amount and random placement of them, it’s hard to tell where one post ends and another begins.

Concerning colour, Full Moon Reviews uses white text on a black background creating an eerie looking blog. This works for them as their blog is focused on darker themed movies entailing the horror, sci-fi and action genres. Ours on the other hand, uses a far brighter colour scheme, blue text on light grey background, which creates a more general light-hearted feeling, with no generalisation on specific genres. Our blog’s text is the same for almost all parts, whereas Full Moon Reviews has a bright red section on the right, which is far too contrasting against the black and is harsh on the eyes.

Dario, Kurt & Lars