The problem
A production company is judged on its reel, which means the site has to lead with moving image, and moving image is the heaviest thing you can put on a web page.
So the site's central asset is also its central liability. Every second spent waiting for a showreel is a second in which the visitor decides they will look at someone else's instead, and they never see the thing that would have convinced them.
The constraint
The brand is bold, the page cannot be heavy
Unboxed sells itself on dismantling expectations, and a timid site would contradict the pitch on sight. The visual language has to be as forward as the work.
But boldness on the web is usually paid for in bytes, full-bleed video, layered motion, large type, high-fidelity stills. Charge all of that to the page and the site performs like a brochure that will not open.
The whole build sits in that gap: everything expensive has to be somebody else's job, so the page itself stays light enough to deliver the impression the design is going for.
What I built
- 01
Cloudinary owns encoding, the app owns layout
Video and stills are transformed at the edge, format, resolution and compression negotiated per request instead of one master file sent to every viewer.
The app never touches a raw asset. It requests a derivative suited to the viewport it is actually rendering into, which is the only way a video-led site stays quick on a phone.
- 02
Motion frames the work, it does not compete with it
Transitions are deliberately bold, but they run on the page furniture, sections arriving, type settling, state changing. The films themselves are never animated on top of.
If the interface is the most interesting thing moving on a film company's site, the site has failed at its one job.
- 03
New projects go in without touching the layout
Portfolio content is data, not markup. A new film is a record, and the templates absorb it, so publishing work never becomes a development task, which is how creative sites end up quietly out of date.
- 04
Indexable despite being visually led
Creative work gets found through search and referral as much as through reputation. Semantic structure, real text alongside the imagery, and metadata built into the templates keep the site legible to crawlers that cannot watch a showreel.