All I need is a good TITLE! (pearlanddean.com)

Member Name: ia_young

Product:	pearlanddean.com
Date:	29/11/01 (153 review reads)
Rating:

Advantages: information on upcoming films, lots of stats

Disadvantages: information on film can be limited

Pearl and Dean are one of the largest names in cinema advertising, doing so in both the UK and in the US. This review is going to be of the website that they run, which is actually quite a useful website to know about. It has information on up and coming films, along with statistics on films such as how much they made and much more. Any way, I will stop the garble (hopefully) and get on with the review?

** Homepage **
Well obviously this is the place that you start from and for most websites if this doesn't look good and or is hard to use it will turn people away from the website. The homepage for Pearl and Dean is actually quite a good one, the colours are nice, they are not too over powering and not too dull, which is quite hard to achieve. They have a nice scrolling list of the current top ten films both in the UK and in the US (showing how much money the films made). Also a major feature of the homepage is a rotating section previewing upcoming films (with estimates on how much money they will take), if you click on this you will get information about the film. This information includes a brief plot, the main actors, the type of film that it is, the age range that is most likely to view the film and links to related websites and or film trailer.

** Cinema Search **
The website also provides a search facility to find cinema around the country. To get to this part of the website roll your mouse over the "CINEMAS" menu option and a popup menu will appear, select "screen search" from this and the search page will load. You can search for cinema's on three different criteria, "location" which you type in, "area" for which there is a drop down list and "circuit" (cinema chain). The results that you get back are very useful; they list each screen for each cinema with information such as the number of seats.

** Film Top Ten **
To access this part of the website rol
lover the menu item "FILM TOP10", a popup menu will appear with three options, "current top ten", "this year's top ten" and "top ten 1989-00". I think you can guess what each of the sections tells you but I will go over that now! The "current top ten" is the current top ten films in cinemas at the present time. The "this year's top ten" is this year's top ten to date. The " top ten 1989-90" are the top ten lists for the years 1989 to 2000. The lists are basically the top ten films on box office takings. The current top ten also shows how much the film has made to date as well as last weeks takings (which it is ordered on!).

** Film Guide **
This is quite a useful feature, you can search on a load of criteria (which I will explain later) for films that are being made, just about to be released or are in the cinema now. The things that you can search on are dates, which a film is to be released; films which start with the letter? and you can search on some text that you input. The search is very quick and the results are displayed in an easy to view manner. Once you get the results you can view information about the films, for the films about to be released there is more information than those that wont be released for a while. The information about the film is the same as I explained earlier when you click for film information from the homepage.

** Rest of the Site **
This is all to do with advertising and film making, which if that is what you are interested in is going to be very useful for you. There is a lot of information about research studies that are carried out for Pearl and Dean, which if you are interested you can download and view. You can also view sales figures for things that are sold in cinemas such as food and drink etc?

** The Site Generally **
Overall this appears to be a very well constructed website, which is very e
asy to use and very fast. The information that is displayed is all relevant and the content is very up to date.

** My Thoughts **
This is a very useful website for finding out about new cinema releases, although it doesn't have much information about the film it does provide you with very useful links to find out more information about the film if you want. A very useful resource!

Summary: