Putting Your Trailer, EPK & Media Online

A film website without its media is just a description of a film, and descriptions don't sell movies — showing does. The best filmmaker websites lead with media: the trailer plays prominently, the stills are large and beautiful, the poster commands the page, and the press kit is right there for anyone who needs it. Your media is your strongest content by far, so this chapter is about putting it online well — not just uploading it, but embedding it so it loads fast, looks great, plays on mobile, and does its job of making visitors want to watch your film. Getting the media right is often the difference between a site that feels alive and professional and one that feels flat. And the good news, again, is that you already have this media (much of it in your Toolbox or EPK); this chapter is about deploying it effectively.

Putting your media online well

How to handle each kind of media:

• The trailer — front and center. Your trailer is usually your single most persuasive asset, so give it a prominent spot (often the home hero or top of the film page) and make it easy to play. Embed it via a video host (YouTube/Vimeo) rather than self-hosting, for fast, reliable playback.
• Stills & key art — big and beautiful. Show your best images large and high-quality, but optimized so they load fast. A striking hero still sets the whole tone; a slow, pixelated one undercuts it.
• The poster. Your key art is a powerful brand image — feature it prominently. It signals the film's genre and quality in a single glance.
• The press kit / EPK. On your press page, make your EPK and high-res stills downloadable and easy to find for journalists and programmers. This is where your EPK course pays off directly.
• Optimize everything for speed & mobile. Compress images, host video externally, and test load times — a beautiful site that loads slowly loses visitors before they see it, especially on phones.
• Keep it current. Swap in new laurels, updated trailers, fresh reviews as they come — living media keeps the site feeling active and accurate.

Making your media work, not just sit there

Two things separate media that sells your film from media that just sits on a page. The first is prominence and quality — your best media should be big, beautiful, and impossible to miss. The trailer shouldn't be a small link buried below the fold; it should be one of the first things a visitor encounters, inviting a click. Your key art and best still should be presented at a scale that lets them do their work. Filmmakers sometimes bury their strongest assets under text or shrink them to thumbnails, which wastes the very content most likely to hook a visitor. Lead with your media, at full strength. The second is technical execution — speed and mobile — because gorgeous media that loads slowly or breaks on a phone actively hurts you. The two big technical wins here are: host your video externally (embed from YouTube or Vimeo rather than uploading raw video files to your site, which is slow and unreliable) so playback is fast and smooth everywhere; and optimize your images (compress them to web-appropriate sizes) so pages load quickly. A slow-loading site loses a real fraction of visitors before they ever see your beautiful content, and that fraction is higher on mobile, where most people are. So test your load times and your mobile experience, and fix what's slow. A few more practical notes. On the press kit: your press page should make your EPK and high-res assets genuinely easy for a journalist or programmer to grab — a clear download, well-organized, with contact info — because making their job easy is how you get coverage, and if you've built an EPK (per that course) this is just a matter of putting it where press can find it. On keeping media current: a film's media evolves — new festival laurels, a recut trailer, fresh reviews — and swapping these in keeps your site accurate and feeling alive rather than frozen at launch; stale media (an old trailer, missing laurels) makes a site feel abandoned. And a reminder of the overall principle: your website's job is partly to convince people to watch your film (Chapter 3), and media is your primary tool for that — a great trailer and striking images do more convincing than any amount of copy. So treat your media as the star of the site, deploy it prominently and at quality, execute the technical side so it's fast and mobile-friendly, keep it current, and make your press assets easy to grab. Do that, and your site does the thing a film site most needs to do: it shows people why they should watch. That completes Module 2 — your site is designed, structured, and full of great media. Module 3 puts it to work in the world, starting with learning from the best film websites out there.