There is going to be a delay in getting the new blog up and running. I have a Blogger site I originally set up to use as the blog, but complications with some features are making it more optimal for me to look into using Wordpress or another service, and thus having to use a hosting service for the blog. This will delay it at least a month or two.
One of the new features I want to add to the blog is primarily what necessitates the delay. I am presently working on my current blog to put up a presskit and resource page for a specific indie film. This gave me the idea that having such a service on the new blog would be useful.
It's not so much that reviewers are lazy, though some most definitely are, but rather having a resource page with a poster image, screencaps, summaries, productions notes, credits, contacts and social media links for cast and crew would be useful to many reviewers. Some of this stuff is available on IMDb. some of it is available on Facebook, but in one handy location, unless you specifically have a website for your film or production company, it is more often not.
Often the most time consuming part of reviewing a film is writing the review and checking your information. Sure, a reviewer can be lazy and assume the actor named Tommie is a guy and playing the male character, but I'm pretty sure SHE doesn't appreciate that. Presskits, resource pages and especially social media links help reviewers to get things right in the first place, have images to use in their reviews, have social media contacts to tag in links to reviews, but most importantly removes hurdles making it easier and therefore more likely your film will get reviews and those reviews will lack misinformation (I said 'lack' not 'be free of').
So how does this feature create a delay?
As the blog grows, having resource pages can become cumbersome in setting them up. Ideally this can be fixed by allowing filmmakers to create their own resource pages rather than having me do it. However, Blogger only allows a certain number of users to be added to a blog, I believe it is 100, and depending on how successful the blog is that can be maxed out in only a few months or less. It would be much harder to fix such a situation on the premise of 'if it happens' than to assume it will happen and fix it in the first place. This means using a different blog system, and the more economical and user friendly option is to set up my own hosting rather than trying to use Wordpress's service which is simply bloated.
*A Note on Posters
Although it is not common, some grassroots filmmakers don't have posters for their films. I have been known to make a poster for a review in such cases, and occasionally where I just didn't like their poster. The reason I do this is unless I have an attention grabbing screencap to lead the review (the first image will be grabbed by social media for display) I want to have a poster image to grab a potential reader's attention.
I am not a graphic designer, and no I'm not offering a poster service. I just use an image editor and a bit of creativity is all. Outside of my main editor, PhotoImpact (shaddup, it rules) I have been having fun with a freeware editor, Toolwiz Pretty Photo, for simple posters and adding speech bubbles to photos I have been using to torture some of you with.
Like any other program, Pretty Photo does have some bugs to get used to. For one, the more fonts you have on your system, I have over 400, will cause it to lag when trying to change fonts. Using more than one font on an image will cause it to lag more, so don't assume the program has froze up, just be patient. It also has a maximum image height and/or width of 1024 pixels, pretty much rendering it most useful for web images. You can load any size image, but if it goes above 1024 pixels in either dimension it will resize down to 1024 pixels while keeping the aspect ratio intact. Depending on your screen resolution, the full image may not show while you are editing it. Use the zoom feature below the image to zoom out to show the full image as it has a tendency to crop the image incorrectly when you save it if you don't zoom out; took me a while to figure out why it was doing that.
Now that may sound like some work with those bugs, but compared to using my main image editor it is a piece of cake and makes it real easy to do a simple poster or add cartoon captions to photos; just try to find a simpler way to add speech bubbles, and that gives you full control over size, position and text. And don't overlook using shadow and bevel when adding a title to a poster image; the shadow, in any editor, makes the text stand out rather just looking flat.
Toxic Fletch
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