Cristo Cola Studios makes films. A studio site is a portfolio where the portfolio happens to weigh several megabytes a piece, and where the work only makes its case if somebody actually waits for it to start.
That gives the build two jobs that pull against each other. The films have to be present enough to be watched, and absent enough that a page of them still opens quickly on a phone with two bars of signal.
A hero that changes shape
The homepage opens on a single full bleed frame from the studio’s own footage, and it is not the same frame on a phone as on a laptop. Two separate images are authored, one landscape and one portrait, and the browser is told about both up front so the right one is already arriving before the layout settles.
Cropping one wide still down to a phone is what most sites do, and it is why so many mobile heroes are a landscape composition with its subject cut in half. Two frames cost one extra export and remove the compromise entirely.
Eighteen films, and no waiting to see them
The portfolio is a three column grid of stills, each one tagged by kind, running to eighteen entries. Every card opens onto a film page laid out in two columns: the title, a one line description, and the format tags on the left, the film itself on the right.
The film pages carry no hero image of their own. The poster is the only picture on the page, which is a deliberate inversion of the usual arrangement where a decorative banner competes with the work underneath it.
Showing film without the weight
No page on the site embeds a video player. What looks like one is a poster image and a button, and the real player is constructed only when somebody clicks, inside a dialog sized to that film’s aspect ratio, then destroyed when the dialog closes.
The saving is the difference between a page of six films costing six third party scripts and one costing six images. We wrote the pattern up in full in a page should never hold a video player.
Colour discipline
The interface is paper white, ink, and greys. The only saturated colour on any page comes from the film stills themselves. The effect is that the work reads as the work rather than as decoration inside a branded frame, and it means the site never competes with the thing it exists to show.
How it is maintained
The repository is the authority on how the site is built, and the live site is the authority on what is true. Values are not edited by hand in an admin panel when a builder owns them: a change goes into the canonical source, gets built, and gets deployed. That rule is what stops a site drifting away from its own source over a couple of years.
Articles are published from a content folder rather than a rich text editor, which is the same approach used on this site.