The launch of nzonscreen has thrown a lot of great New Zealand film and documentary material out to the world and offered a few lessons in information design along the way. It started popping up in the ether-consciousness mid-week after an unpublicised soft launch followed by the official launch on Thursday evening, 23 October. Since then, the feedback (positive) and requests for other films (extensive) has been rolling in.

It’s easy to see why, and Lively won’t be the first or last to say that. Put simply, it’s lovely. Ok, so you might run through your download allowance before you notice the lo-res viewing option, but the tightly-knit connections that take you from people to films and from films to other people and on to their films is just stunning. Add in some background material and link in a few related titles and you start to really see the stories and context around the richly-structured content.

A few highlights have to be three minutes of filing fun with Being Billy Apple, events on the waterfront during 1951 (diplomatically referred to as a ‘dispute’ throughout), and not to overlook Merata Mita’s record of the Springbok tour of 1981, Patu! – a passionless people indeed.

The team are actively following reviews of the site. Given this, if I could change anything, it might be to add ‘trailer’ as type of content to distinguish them from the full features (or just tell me how long a clip is in the results views), and adding some extra information about the clips used to break up a full-length film (some sort of DVD-style episode summaries). But that’s quibbling and the team behind the site are upfront about welcoming feedback so it’s likely that this site will only get better.

This entry was posted on Thursday, October 30th, 2008 at 1:58 pm and is filed under Building audiences, Culture online, National identity, New in the sector, Technology. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.