Cinema Set Free

My first love being indie film, I'd been scheming on a website to support indie filmmakers and productions since I first laid eyes on the web. The scope of the project varied over the years as I was not yet good enough to build some of the UI ideas I had in my head. In 2011 we released a number of mobile apps for finding crew and scouting locations. We used them on real shoots and that feedback loop was very useful early on.

For our first payed product we wanted to automate the creation of simple but polished looking portfolios as a kind of user profile. Still imagining there could be social networks for professions, everyone could use ' the same tools, yet have a personalized, seperate site to further their own career. My idea was to provide guide rails, so no matter what choice the user made, they wouldn't be able to break the site designs or spend too much time learning the tool like Wix and SS. It would look professional and clean without any effort, just multiple choices and instant feedback.

I wanted a retro homage to comic books for the dashboards. A look and feel I continue to develop to this day. The soft gradient look was a noticable difference from the flat UI lemmings across the web, and we liked it that way. Nowadays design is coming back around to gradients. I will often employ greyscale at the outset of a UX design and add sparse colors where neccessary to indicate focus and direction.

The site was built using Ruby on Rails for the JSON server, having had a few iterations with Rails' sad ideas about how to orchestrate a frontend, we switched to CanJS to provide a better UX. Everything was custom from the media uploader that could take Youtube and Vimeo URLs to the site designer that could be tailored to ask the right questions for each site. I finished the interactive builder with a static build system that would deploy the sites to a static apache server coupled with a CDN to serve hundreds or thousands of sites for pennies.