I love Natalie Portman, but her website skills are another matter

Natalie Portman has launched Making Of, a new social sharing site dedicated to the movie industry.

Making Of, as the name suggests, focuses on the movie making process, and aims to offer an outlet for everyone from directors through to the make up department to share their insights. The site has a strong focus on video, with interviews and trailers, and also supports related promotional material.

It’s a reasonable enough idea on paper, but the implementation is more than lacking. The problem isn’t design (although the site has bugs, and doesn’t use imagery enough), but simply content, or more specifically a huge lack of content. The only way to scale a site like this is to offer enough seed content to get it started. Instead, the cupboard at Making Of is bare, with a few interviews, but mostly movie trailers that can be found on many other sites. Users can sign up to be a part of the “community,” but exactly who this is opened to, and what they get just isn’t explained, other than a profile page. Notably the little content on the site doesn’t offer any interaction (such as commenting), so where as you can join the community, the idea of community is limited.

This is not to say that the site will fail: if, and only if they can quickly find more willing participants, it might go the distance. But the longer that takes, the lower the chances of it surviving. I love Natalie Portman as an actress, but her skills don’t seem to extend online, or at the very least in getting her (and her partners in the site) to be smart enough to get outside help. This site would seem to have been delivered without even some basic guidance from someone who understands social media and social marketing, and that sadly may be a costly mistake.