Studio
The Wed Films
A studio site built around three films that stream properly, with enquiries going straight to WhatsApp.
- Client
- Aref · The Wed Films
- Year
- 2026
- Scope
- Design, build, host
- Palette
- Paper · wine · ink
The shape
A videography studio's site has to actually play video well, which is less obvious than it sounds.
The work is three chapter films, so the site is built around them rather than around a gallery. Paper, wine and ink for the palette; Spectral for the serif. Deliberately warmer and more printed-feeling than the photography archive — a different client, a different identity, not a recolour of the last project.
What I built
The screen
- Three chapter films
- Paper, wine and ink, set in Spectral
- An enquiry form
The logic
- Next.js Edge API route
- Enquiries relayed to WhatsApp
- Credentials only on the server
The data
- FFmpeg-encoded films, the largest 43MB
- Video kept off git, on the server
- Served behind Caddy
The chapter clips were encoded through FFmpeg to sizes that actually stream. The largest is 43MB, and it only fits under GitHub's 100MB limit because it was compressed hard first.
They're kept out of git anyway and live on the server instead, so a deploy pulls source without dragging tens of megabytes of video through every clone.
One hard decision
Enquiries go to WhatsApp, not an inbox
The studio runs on WhatsApp, and an enquiry that lands in an inbox nobody checks is the same as no enquiry. So the contact form posts to a Next.js Edge API route that relays it straight to the studio's WhatsApp. The relay's credentials are environment variables on the server, never in the repo and never in a client bundle.
What I'd change now
I'd encode each film at two or three sizes and let the player choose. One hard-compressed file per film streams well on a good connection and asks too much of a weak one.
Stack
- Next.js
- React
- TypeScript
- GSAP
- Tailwind
- Edge API routes
- FFmpeg
- Caddy