Background
Vita Brevis Films is a Salt Lake City based film production company shooting short videos and commercials for clients such as Red Bull and Adobe. Working closely with the marketing staff at VBF was exciting and collaboration was key as we explored various layouts, features, and functions for the site.
Left: grid as it is on the homepage. Right: drag and drop builder in the backend
Home page grid
The most robust feature is the grid on the home page. Not only does it include complex overlays, I needed to set it up in a way they could manage it themselves. I employed the use of a plugin called Media Grid. This allowed for a drag-n-drop interface in the back end where they could specify the size and positioning of each block in the backend of WordPress. The overlay itself was fairly complex as well. Pulling dynamic data from the back end including post number, category, post link, excerpt, etc. The end result is a beautiful responsive display of their most recent projects. In the process of customizing the overlay, I reached out to the plugin developer for some help. After reviewing my code and seeing the result, he noted that it was the most complex overlay he's seen implemented in his plugin.Other challenges and functionality
Another feature included a showcase section in which they could list videos when clicked would show up in the player at the top. Since loading 12+ embedded videos on page load is a performance nightmare, each video is loaded only after clicking play on the top poster.
