Thursday, April 2, 2009

That's the Signpost Up Ahead...

A few days ago I happened to notice that Squidoo lenses about the Twilight movie, based on books by Stephenie Meyer, tend to rank pretty high. Seeing the word "Twilight" reminded me of Rod Serling's great TV series The Twilight Zone. It occurred to me to do a search of Squidoo to see if anyone had done a lens about it yet.

I was a bit surprised when all I found was a video showcase lens that uses the YouTube module in thumbnail mode to present videos for a few episodes. The thumbnail mode means people are drawn away from the lens to view the vids. Like most video showcases (even mine, but I often have other lenses related to the showcases with more info) there wasn't a whole lot of content about the TV show itself. So I decided to do a lens.

I was pleased to find out "the-twilight-zone" ending for the lens URL was available, so I was off to a good start. This time I didn't start out adding DVDs and books. I left that to near the end. First I wrote the content. Wikipedia had several pages about the show and Serling. There were other sites as well, and I have an aging copy of The Complete Directory to Prime Time Network TV Shows.

There wasn't much available in the way of copyright-free images, but I did find one of Serling that at least claimed to be public domain. I needed more, so I found one of an artist's mannequin, gave it a black background and put little white dots in the background to simulate stars, then rotated the image to about the angle the mannequin in the opening sequence of the show appears in. I also found an eyeball image to modify.

The show was in black and white, so I used grey/silver backgrounds. Where I used borders, I made them black. Normally I wouldn't do that, but considering the show wasn't in color, it works.

The lens also covers the movie and the other two series, one from the 1980s and the other that ran only one season on UPN in 2003-2004. For Amazon stuff, I've got the "definitive" boxed set of 156 remastered episodes, the movie, and four books about the show.

I'm wondering if anyone will stumble into the lens while looking for stuff about the Twilight movie.

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