Friends of Cinema
A site that feels like the films, for a studio that makes them.
An independent production company needed a website that felt like the work: art-house, editorial, slow where it should be slow. Not another templated agency homepage. For a creative studio the site is itself a portfolio piece, so the brief was craft first.
The brief
The studio had a body of film work and no site that did it justice. The references they brought were cinema title sequences and photography books, not other agency sites.
Two practical requirements sat under the aesthetic one: the team had to be able to update the portfolio themselves, and the site had to load fast on the phones their audience actually uses.
Constraints
- No in-house developer after launch, so content changes could not depend on Oryares.
- Film stills are large; motion had to feel cinematic without shipping video.
- Launch date tied to a festival, with no slack.
The system, piece by piece.
- 01
A React, Vite and TypeScript front end
Hand-built, no page builder. Tailwind for layout, Framer Motion for page transitions and scene-by-scene reveals.
- 02
The motion language
A full-screen parallax hero with a film-grain overlay, a custom cursor with blend-mode effects, and transitions timed to read like cuts rather than slides.
- 03
A filterable portfolio
The studio's films, filterable by format, with per-film pages.
- 04
A content backend the studio runs
Supabase Postgres, Storage and Auth behind a client-manageable schema with row-level security, so the team updates films and stills without a developer.
The calls that shaped it.
Build, not template
A theme would have been faster and would have flattened the one thing the client was paying for. The craft is the product here.
Grain and cuts instead of video
Cinematic feel came from grain, timing and transitions, which cost almost nothing to load. Background video would have cost the mobile audience.
Supabase with RLS over a CMS
The studio needed to change a handful of things, not run an editorial operation. A small schema with row-level security gave them that without a CMS to learn or pay for.
Outcome
Live in production on Vercel. The studio updates its own portfolio, and the site carries the studio's identity instead of a template's.
Credits
- Design, build and deployment: Oryares Solutions.
- Films and stills: Friends of Cinema.