Actor Bill Oberst Jr
Website: www.billoberst.com
About the Client
Bill Oberst Jr. is a Los Angeles-based American actor known for his unsettling screen presence. In life he is the polar opposite of his volatile on-screen persona and is a frequent motivational speaker in schools and churches. For his site redesign, he wanted something that reflected the duality of his roles and persona. As an actor whose stage and screen work encompasses terrifying horror to mainstream historic roles and drama, his site had to feature his horror work strongly, but also be clean, easy to navigate and capable of featuring mainstream work as well.
Challenges & Goals:
Bill is incredibly web-savvy, is a strong content curator and is adept at marketing himself and his work online in many formats. Thus, he had a large amount of content on his old site, mostly piled together and also has a large number of offsite resources and profiles. We had to create a site structure that would allow him to organize and compartmentalize his diverse media and content, making it easy for agents, fellow actors and fans to find what they wanted to on the site easily and quickly, with a minimum number of clicks. We also needed to make it easy to find him at his many professional online profile and social media hubs.
Bill Oberst Jr. fits squarely into the long cinematic horror tradition of the human body as an object of fear. In early development, Bill wanted to explore his physical attributes in relation to his roles and career on the site in an artistic fashion that didn't involve Flash animation. We had to find a way to create a sort of 'mini-site' to feature his anatomy and its significance in his career.
Outcome:
The site's strength resides in its tight navigation structure and use of blog categories to compartmentalize his many content areas. From videos and photos, to case studies of his various roles, testimonials, interviews and merchandise, everything is easy to find from any point in the website, making navigation and exploration a breeze. Video embedding in blog posts or pages is stylish and easy for the visitor to use and the photo galleries are fast-loading and easy to use, also.
We also made sure that styled icons leading to his primary social media hubs are accessible on every page of the site and included a prominent contact form for interested visitors to reach him quickly and easily.
For his mini-site, we created a section titled 'The Anatomy of Fear'. It functions as a lightbox, with sound, interactive imagery and styled text areas. Each panel contains an attribute or two of his physique and features a text area appearing when hovering over the imagery. The final panel contains a creepy TV set playing a clip of his work with sound and video created by RRC especially for the mini-site. Anatomy of Fear also contains the creepy, taxidermy-based artwork of Scott Bibus (www.liquid-fish.com)
As a bonus added touch, we highlighted the duality of his career by including a special rollover animation of his face in the header of the site, giving vistors a special treat.
LOVE LETTER TO HORROR
Bill's website was called "a love letter to horror" by the esteemed horror site Dread Central!
Killer Crew:
Chuk Hintz: WordPress website design and development. Sound and video development of TV video clip in Anatomy of Fear mini-site.
Briana Malmstrom: Project management, navigation and wireframing, design consultation and assistance, site build-out, and ongoing internet marketing and social media marketing consultation.
