Film Board

The Film Board at Michigan Tech is a club that shows weekly movies to campus and the wider community. I was looking for a project to expand my web development skills, and creating a non-trival website from scratch seemed like it'd be a good start.

I started by approaching them with a mockup of a possible redesign to see if they'd be interested. They were, and after some initial discussion I started development. The entire process was client-driven; we met regularly to discuss progress and what needed to be changed. I tracked tasks using Trello.

The goals were to both make the site look more modern while also adding new functionality. We ended up not going with the logo I designed due to branding concerns.

I ended up making a simple CMS to add / edit / delete pages (they wanted something easy to use, since the old site used WordPress).

Adding movies is supercharged on the new site. As a comparision, adding the same movie on the WordPress site took ~180 seconds vs. ~45 on my redesign. I was able to accomplish this by auto-filling almost all the required fields (description, ratings, actors, poster, showtimes, etc.). The trailer is also now automatically downloaded and processed, something that wasn't possible before.

I've checked in at least once a month to make sure everything's running smoothly, and so far there haven't been any issues. I also preemptively update the youtube-dl dependency occasionally so trailer downloads don't break (I'd like to have an automated process for this in the future).