This project was for FourBoys Entertainment, a film production company that's made several movies in the comedy and drama categories over the past several years. They reached out to me in need of an entirely new website, as their previous one was no longer functional. FourBoys explained to me they had a tight deadline, as they wanted the website online before they released the trailer for their upcoming "Unexpected" movie, which gave a timeline of roughly three weeks. Additionally, they did not have a lot of high-quality existing assets to work with in terms of their company, but had plenty available in terms of the media they've produced. For the most part, FourBoys were quite busy with the upcoming media launch for their new movie and therefore didn't have much time to work with me on the site, thus I was mainly left to my own devices. They didn't have a clear picture of what they wanted the site to look like, but did request a press page to be implemented, and had a lot of text they needed to be put on the site somewhere.

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I had never created anything related to a film production company prior to this website, so much of my initial research was dedicated towards figuring out who the target audience for the site was. I figured the average person interested in their movies would more than likely just go to a site like Youtube or iMDB to find trailers or info respectively, so this website was to be more for brand recognition & awareness for the company as a whole. The people visiting this website were more likely to be on the actual side of movie production and development rather than just a movie enjoyer. Therefore, I designed much of the site to be more portfolio-and-highlights-based, with the main goal of showing off how much amazing content FourBoys is currently producing and has produced over the years, rather than a site to simply showcase trailers. This resulted in three main pages to direct the viewer - About, Portfolio, and Press.

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Though FourBoys was lacking in high-quality existing assets of their company for me to use, they did have a clear existing brand identity, which helped immediately conceptualize what kind of typography, color scheme, and logos I would be utilizing. Additionally, even though they were lacking high-quality assets relating to their company, they had a lot to work with in terms of the movies they've produced. Since it was easy to obtain trailers and screenshots of the content they've made over the years, the lack of other company-branding assets was not a huge hinderance. This resulted in the website being mainly covered in images of their content rather than images of their company, which was something I was initially worried about since this theoretically went against the goal I had created for the website (as it was now showcasing their content rather than FourBoys themselves), but in practice it ended up looking just fine. I ended up on a more "asset-light" page design, as in minimalistic with a focus on text, and only using the content images in a way that accentuated the texts & links rather than being the highlight themselves.

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While developing the website, I used Figma to quickly sketch out what the more nuanced press and portfolio pages would look like, then used Webflow entirely for implementing the design. Occasionally I used Photoshop to edit some of the lower-quality assets I pulled from their older movies. Overall, I didn't find this site to be particularly difficult to make despite the tight deadline and my unfamiliarity with the movie production industry - most of the pages were very clear on what they needed to showcase and how to do so. The About page would be to showcase the founders, which I designed to be a very simple and clear "about me" page with bio and profile pictures. The Portfolio page didn't need individual pages showcases their films, rather the page just needed to be a compiliaton of links to each film's respective iMDB page. The Press page would take the most time to implement, as it required categorization and individual pages for each press post they wanted to highlight. That said, a Press page is nothing new, and I went with a simple and proven design layout.

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After the launch of the website and the subsequent launch of their new trailer, FourBoys and I were able to meet more frequently to go over any additional changes or edits they wanted implemented. The clients were very happy with the initial design of the site and particularly noted how they liked the minimalistic, black design. Over the next few months, we would occasionally have meetings to decide what future content they wanted added, as well as add new press posts about their upcoming film as they were published. We ended up creating a Media page just for the occasional trailer they wanted to highlight at the time, which was an easy addition since it followed the same design layout as the Press page. Overall, I would say I'm happy how the site came out, though I do think it could have improved upon with a little bit more time pre-launch. The About page is somewhat lacking in originality, and the Portfolio page is more of a link-tree than a proper portfolio (I would have loved to work with them to create "case study"-esque descriptions of their content to post on individual portfolio pages, but they didn't seem interested and didn't have the time to really do so in the first place). In the end, there's only so much you can do within such a tight timeframe, and as long as the clients like the site then I'm satisfied.