Rebranding

The craze of last week’s snowstorm granted me an extra week off of school - the perfect time for some introspection and reflection. To make the most of my time, I reflected on some of the things I don’t typically have the time to work on. The biggest project I’ve been neglecting for weeks is updating my website.

Besides the weekly blogs, I haven’t updated my website since the year (2021) started. I’ve made a lot of progress since then, and the initial theme I chose for my website at the beginning of the year simply wasn’t aligning with how I wanted to present myself to the world. With all the time I had, I decided to take an opportunity to rebrand myself by building a new website from the ground up.

The biggest issue I had with my website was the font pairings I used. Don’t get me wrong - I love a good serif font. But I did notice that many filmmakers are all about the latest and greatest in the sense that everything about the way they present themselves is clean and modern. Typically, serif fonts give a slightly older and more formal appearance. I didn’t decide to rebrand simply because every other filmmaker seemed to have a different style, though - I just happened to really like this clean and modern look.

My first order of business was to find a new font pairing. Starting with the home page, I looked for a font that was bold and modern-looking. Something attention-grabbing and impactful. The best way I can describe the font I wanted is a sans serif font that looks like something many graphic designers would use for modern products or posters. Perhaps a font like Alata or Josefin Sans.

Because I was using Wix to build my site, the built-in fonts were slightly different than the typical Google fonts I was used to. I ended up using a font called Lulo Clean, and I decided to pair this with Futura for paragraphs and subheadings. I liked the contrast it offered, and it established the “clean” look I was seeking.

I know I said I was rebuilding my site from the ground up, but that isn’t quite true. I decided to work off a photography portfolio template to 1) give me some direction and 2) benefit from the pre-established site navigation.

Because I worked off a template, I became acutely aware of how many stock images I would have to replace. It was a photography portfolio after all, and I am an aspiring filmmaker. A lack of stills or videos on my site wouldn’t reflect too terribly well. Upon realizing this, I also discovered how many stills I don’t have, especially of myself.

I’ve learned a lot about lighting and shooting since the beginning of the year when I took my profile picture for my about me page, so I decided to do a photoshoot for myself, recreating the original effect I was after all those months ago. Luckily, with better lighting this time around, I think the results came out much better.

Believe it or not, the original concept was to experiment with red and blue (or warm and cool) lighting coming from opposite sides of the frame. My first go at it was not very successful (as seen in the photo on the left). My most recent trial is not perfect either, but at least it captures the effect I was going for and shows the growth in my knowledge about lighting.

In the photo on the left, all I had was a relatively large ring light and my kitchen light - my equipment (or creativity in using them) was not very impressive. At that time, I also had very little knowledge of focal lengths - I didn’t know that using a longer focal length blurred the background more. It was just my luck that I had to zoom in anyways (making my focal length closer to 45mm instead of 15mm, making the background more blurred, which is ideal for portraits) to hide nearby items I didn’t want visible in the frame.

In the photo on the right, I used two separate lamps and placed them on either side of the camera. The lamp on the left had a red bulb in it, and I put it about 2.5 feet away from me at about a 45-degree angle. The lamp on the right side had a daylight/cooler temperature lightbulb in it (with a lampshade over it for diffusion), and I placed this lamp slightly further back so that the red lamp would be the dominant light on my face.

In hindsight, I probably should have placed a lampshade over the red bulb as well, then used other external light sources to make sure the frame was bright enough. The harsh highlight on the left side of my face in the photo would’ve been softened that way, but I suppose everything serves as a learning opportunity - my setup for this photo was nowhere near perfect, but it was a big step in the right direction.

Unfortunately, the rebranding process for my website is nowhere near complete. Nonetheless, the progress I’ve made feels promising, and I’ll continue to work on it little by little as time progresses alongside my original work project. Hopefully, without the weather being an issue, I can secure a time to film the interviews I need for my video in the coming weeks. Then, I can set my focus on my original work again and work to get my video edited, graded, and published.