Designing
The 5-25-77 Website
©2007 By Rick Ingalsbe
Even though the film was not quite finished yet, Patrick decided that he wanted to show his movie on the 30th anniversary of Star Wars. What better place than at Star Wars Celebration IV in LA? With the film deep in post production, plans for the screening of 5-25-77 on 5-25-07 were being made by director Patrick Read Johnson and producer Gary Kurtz. To announce this screening, Patrick took down the initial movie website at www.5-25-77.com and replaced it with a one page ad that started with, "Even after 30 years you never forget your first time - 5-25-77 on 5-25-07."
While Patrick was promoting the film in LA, I was in Louisville, KY promoting the film at WonderFest. Along with the models I made for the I.L.M. scene, I displayed posters that I made mostly from photos I took on the set. However, in one of the posters I included a couple of pages from the original 5-25-77 website.
Patrick and I hadn't spoken about it, but, when the screening in LA was over I expected the website to be back up and running again. As it turned out, months were passing and that screening announcement was still in place of a full website. In my mind, the movie needed to have a continued web presence. Of course, this got me to thinking about it.
Ideas would cross my mind about what the website could look like. I decided to come up with a few samples that defined a new look and style. I then submitted my ideas to Patrick in an e-mail that offered them to him as ideas to use if he so chose for whenever he was ready to relaunch the site.
When Patrick is excited or happy about something, it is reflected in his e-mails in capital letters. There was no question that he felt I was going in the right direction, "THAT IS BEAUTIFUL!" He then told me that he had been wondering for a long time what to do for the website, and that my take on it was, "SPECTACULAR!" It was then that he asked me if I wouldn't mind redesigning the entire site.
I already had some thoughts on what it could look like, and now I had the chance to go for it. I wanted the look of the site to revolve around the main character, Pat Johnson's love of movies. There is a line in the film, which can also be heard in the trailer which says about Pat, "To everybody else movies are something you do when you are tired of real life. To you, real life is something you do when you are tired of watching movies." That is what I thought best describes Pat, so I wanted the website to reflect this.
In the film, being in a movie theater is like being within a safe haven for the Pat Johnson character. Right away I knew I wanted the trailer to appear as though it were being shown inside a movie theater. I did the same thing for the gallery page. Keeping with the movie theater theme, I used old tickets I found in a drawer to represent buttons to advance the gallery of photos and for "getting in" to the theater to see the trailer.
Patrick had given me the entire rough cut of the movie months earlier. I used that to extract any images I would need for characters and the gallery of photos. I spent countless hours going through the movie, over and over again to choose images at just the right moments.
Since the Pat character spends all his spare time making movies with a Super-8 movie camera in his back yard, I thought it appropriate to have the website menus appear as strips of Super-8 film.
I made good use of the movie poster art created by artist Mike Pawlak, who also served as the Special Effects Supervisor on the film. Coming up with variations of this poster, I was able to create the home page, synopsis and production pages.
Originally Patrick asked me if I could have the site finished and online in a week. Considering I had other commitments, I told him that wouldn't be possible. Instead I did my best to have it done in two weeks. But ideas inevitably kept coming. Before we knew it, two weeks turned into two months of what Patrick called a "productive period of gestation." In that time Patrick came up with the idea of a map page that would further explain Pat's feelings about growing up on "the edge of the edge of nowhere," but would also show clips of the various places that are important to the story. Calling it "Pat's World," I submitted several designs before we got it just right. Character descriptions were a team effort with ideas coming from myself, Patrick, producers, even actors got into it.
Then at the beginning of October, 2007, the new official 5-25-77 movie website was launched. And, like the movie itself, it went public as a work in progress.
UPDATE:
For the premiere of the film at the 2008 Hamptons International Film Festival, the title of the film changed from 5-25-77 to just '77. This change required that I update the site in time for the festival. For the updated version, click here.
