Sava Dobrev Showreel

Sava asked me to create a website to showcase his short films. A key idea was to have a quickly loading silent showreel, a nice alternative to hosting the video on other platforms.

Inspired by beautiful simplicity seen on Brutalist Websites, I created a sober layout with only 5 direct children: two contact details, one about me section, one films section, and a central showreel.

The showreel fits tightly inside the screen with a slight padding, and the background is a faint dark-gray so as not to create the impression of unwanted letterboxes in different screen formats. Without a doubt, it is best seen on a landscape-oriented computer screen.

The website's layout functions as a sober one-page business card, using the default monospace font on the viewer's device.

Technical aspects

To avoid unnecessary bandwidth use, the cursor is replaced by play-pause controls using simple JavaScript and the video does not auto-play. While we wanted the video to automatically play, it would increase the size of the initial download. With the controls, visitors on a smaller data budget can choose for themselves when to launch the video.

Using the command-line video tool FFMPEG, the file was compressed into a convenient bitrate and size for web use, and its headers (the MPEG5 MOOV atom) were put at the start of the file to optimize for quick loading times. Its size was shrunk at almost one tenth of the original.