Kickin' it Old School

Found a great site today for Kickin' it Old School. This site epitomizes good design in entertainment sites. The second you load the site the preloader has a silhouette of someone break dancing and the music is 80's classic 'Freakshow on the Dance Floor.' It has a great call out for news on the homepage which looks dynamic so it will be easy to update. However I would like to see a trailer there as well to encourage people to see the film. Afterall the site is supposed to sell you on buyin a ticket to see the film. The navigation is brilliant, made up of classic 80's imagery with text so you know what it leads to just in case you don't recognize that things the View Master that leads to the gallery. The transitions are great, big sweeping pen scribbles, classic of the 80's graphic design. The gallery shows the images as Polaroids, which is a bit odd since they used the View Master on the front. Maybe they should have used a Polaroid camera as a nav item, but then again, perhaps the legal team shut that idea down. The music is controlled by a boom box sitting in the corner and download is represented by old school computer. They are following the trends seen on other sites and offer a down-loadable widget which plays the trailer and allows you to select one of 5 characters you would like to display. However at this time there is no method of downloading it... Other than that my only complaint has to be on the video page. It seems someone cut some corners (or maybe just pathed it wrong) because the large trailer option just plays a scaled up medium version. (The video bug has since been corrected as of the latest update of this entry.) The tickets section is a little vague as it displays a sub menu behind it to visit one of the three ticketing sites, however the links blend it a bit too much with the graphics. Overall though a really well designed site.

Update (5/1/07):

Two new sections have been added to this site since review. First is the poster generator. This could be the most innovative way I have seen to mask user submitted photos. Its a bit confusing at first because it shows an outline that your picture will fit in but offers no masking guides like most sites do. The second step then allows you to paint a live dynamic mask complete with brush stroke size options. The only think they are lacking here (and would have been easy to add) is a reverse, so instead of only painting out the image, you could paint parts of it back in, the exact same way you paint masks in Photoshop. Still though being that is Flash and not Photoshop its quite robust in masking.

Another great addition to the site is groundbreaking contest called the Green Screen Challenge where the user is encouraged to download the footage from the film and mix it up with their own backgrounds. These types of contests are actually getting to be more popular rather quickly, as there is another one for the band Modest Mouse http://www.modsetmousemusic.com/video is being promoted by Apple. It will be interesting to see what the users create. This is a really great showing the leap of faith advertisers are more comfortable with the consumer completing more difficult tasks. Such as cutting together there own trailer for Disturbia.

http://www.kickinitmovie.com/

Rating: 9.5