By Winnie Wong
www.zoetrope.com is the unimaginatively
presented website for Francis Ford Coppola's many baby projects, including
the Zoetrope magazine, the Cafe Niebaum-Coppola, the Biancaneaux Lodge
in Belize, and the production studios - also named Zoetrope Studios.
Confusing, no? Yet despite the website's rather boring and cluttered
design, Zoetrope Studios (just the studio part) hides a surprisingly
vibrant community of creative professionals.
Zoetrope Studios consists of writing, art and design, music and sound,
acting, directing and film school communities, in which writers, artists,
designers, composers and actors can come together and discuss their
work. This is more than an inane chat room of part-time bartenders
though; Zoetrope Studios actually offers a place for serious review
and critique of high-quality work. Each member (of the separate professions)
submit works (whether that be a score, or a screenplay or a resume)
that their colleagues critique. For every one item you submit, you
must review 5 others. The work that is posted is also said to be reviewed
by Coppola's production company and sometimes bought. As a result,
unlike most other web-based communities, the members of Zoetrope actually
seem to take the site seriously.
As a self-contained community, Zoetrope seems to be an ideal fulfillment
of the much-hyped communication potentials of the Internet. It provides
a place for otherwise unknown or geographically dispersed colleagues
to come together in a forum of mutual support and interest. Zoetrope
seems to have overdone it a little though - by providing not just
general chat (the "Cafe") but private chat rooms (the "Private
Offices"), an email service ("Zmail"), a screening
room (the "Arzner Theater") separate homepages for each
profession ("Buildings") with separate mini-homepages for
each specialization ("sections"). VERY confusing. Zoetrope's
design flaw seems to be that it attempts to create a real life metaphor
for a web-based community. Real life, especially the organization
of a production studio, is complex - the 2-D Internet webpage shouldn't
be.
Kudos for content, a frustrated, bemused shaking-of-the-head for
inefficient design.