The Beginning - Making an Actor Website

Having never made a website before, (unless you count year 7 ICT - which I don’t), everything was completely new to me. To begin with, I chose a template from Wix and began experimenting and finding out what different aspects of do and how I can use them to my advantage. Some of the necessary sections, such as a place for blogs, audio reel and an actor CV were missing from the template, so I added them, and put in my own images and text to begin personalising the website.

We were advised to have two fonts that went well with each other – whether just the bold/heading version with the normal text version, or two different fonts that complemented each other. I decided on ‘Alice’ for the body, since I liked the subtly of the font, as well as it being a reference to my interest in ‘Alice in Wonderland’ themed things, with ‘Playfair Display’ for the headings as they complemented each other well.

However, finding a colour palette was not so easy. Using a separate website, I was able to identify colours that I thought would look good together, but when put on the website, the colours looked much odder than they previously had, when they had just been shown in equal blocks. I was, fortunately, able to solve this through experimentation. I ended up using three main colours in a subtle pattern throughout the website,

with black and white for the smaller details.

Additionally, I needed to create a showreel, which was difficult as, like the website, I had never done anything like it before. As it turns out, the showreel itself was actually the easy bit – editing the videos to put in the showreel was a different story. I especially struggled with the two-hander as I wanted enough variation in shots to keep the viewer interested and show the reactions of each character, but not too much as to overwhelm the viewer. I settled on a simple, yet effective steady zoom in and out on the front camera, to draw the viewer into the conversation, allowing them to see the expressions of both characters, which would have been difficult from the side camera.

Having added my own pictures (which I changed to something more professional looking once I had access to them), text, colours and showreel to the website, I only had to focus on the little things, such as what I wanted the back button to look like (it took a surprisingly long time to decide).

To conclude, creating the actor website was a surprisingly enjoyable experience considering my lack of technical knowledge, though it did come with its challenges. Although there is still room for improvement, I am definitely pleased with what I have done so far.