Aref · The Wed Films
The Wed Films — wedding videography studio
A videography studio's site has to actually play video well, which is less obvious than it sounds.
Designed, built and self-hosted
The shape
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.
Getting the video right
The chapter clips were encoded through FFmpeg to sizes that would actually stream — the largest is 43MB, past GitHub's 100MB hard limit only because it was compressed hard first.
They're deliberately kept out of git and live on the server instead, so a deploy pulls source without dragging tens of megabytes of video through every clone. It's a small operational decision that keeps the repo usable.
Enquiries that actually arrive
The contact form posts to a Next.js Edge API route that relays the enquiry straight to the studio's WhatsApp. For a studio that runs on WhatsApp anyway, an enquiry landing in an inbox nobody checks is the same as no enquiry.
Credentials for the relay are server-side environment variables on the systemd unit — never in the repo, never in a client bundle.
Stack
- Next.js
- React
- TypeScript
- GSAP
- Tailwind
- Edge API routes
- FFmpeg
- Caddy