Behind New Film Media

A new addition to the portfolio is film producer Ben Adams’ New Film Media website. It’s hard not acknowledge Ben’s talents as a producer given some of the work on his site.

It’s a website that I really wanted to do in textpattern, but with the deadline being so tight, unfortunately, I had to put it together as a static site. Rather than use Dreamweaver templates, or even worse, straight HTML, I decided to weave a bit of PHP magic.

So what’s the benefit of using PHP in this case? There are a lot of pages that do essentially the same task – show a video clip. Although there’s a page for each video clip, it’d get uglier to have a page with any repetitive code in it. If you can cut down the repetition and have each page as generic as possible, it will make changing the design easier down the track.

Let’s break down the TVCS page:

• Our variables
• Header code
• Section we’re in
• Navigation
• Video clip
• Credits
• Email to a friend
• TVC thumbails
• Footer code

This is where most of the ‘tricky’ stuff happens. For each page I’m setting a bunch a variables to handle some naming tasks.

• $Section: This gets used in the body tag to control the CSS for the navigation li element. The CSS below changes the background position of the image when that element is found under the body id of ‘tvcs’.

• $thisPage: Gets passed into the video.php file to tell it what the Quicktime poster frame and video filename is called.

If it’s not obvious, there’s ONE video.php file covering 16 videos. If the client decides that he want to change the video format from Quicktime to Flash at some point, we only to change that one video file and boom, it’s done.

• $Title: This gets passed over to email_on.php and the credits_table.php.

• $Producer & $Director: Passed to credits_table.php

Email on:

The client wanted to have a mechanism whereby a clip link could be emailed to someone. This uses a mailto: link along with the variables we used previously and and additional piece of PHP.

• echo curPageURL();: We’re specifying a link in the email and this inserts the current URL into the body of the email. This has some drawbacks. The viewers email client needs to be set as the default in their browser. The format can also vary depending on what email client you use.

GMail:

Thunderbird:

The ugly bit

That’s about the gist of it. Once I had one page working, it was simply a case of creating a page for each clip. Not the most ideal situation but it was certainly made faster by changing a few key variables at the top of the page. Better this than sifting through an entire page and changing links to filenames. Not being a ‘complete’ php man either, I’m sure there are a dozen better ways to handle this kind of site.