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Royalty Films Tech Lead + Drupal frontend

Royalty Films

Complete redesign of royaltyfilms.co — production company with a deep audiovisual catalogue. Built custom Drupal modules so each production showcases on the home with a silent looped preview, and click-to-expand into a full player with sound. Each work's detail page exposes credits, client, year and context, and the team manages everything from a simple admin panel.

Role
Tech Lead + Drupal frontend
Duration
3 months
Stack
Royalty Films
Royalty Films — production company cover
§ 01 Challenge

A production company with a deep catalogue of audiovisual work — but the previous site reduced everything to static thumbnails. The product pages didn't give a prospective client enough context to understand what to watch or what to ask for, and the team depended on developers for every catalogue update.

  • Work catalogue shown only as static thumbnails — clients couldn't sense the pace, color or tone of each production.
  • Product pages had no structured information (client, year, crew, credits) — everything was free-form description.
  • Every editorial change went through a developer; the production team waited weeks to publish a new piece in the catalogue.
§ 02 Approach

How I tackled it

01
Month 1

Audit + architecture

Complete audiovisual catalogue inventory and Drupal content model: types for production, client, year, credits. Symmetric bilingual structure from day one. URL strategy and technical SEO decisions before touching any template.

02
Month 2

Custom video modules

Built custom Drupal modules to render each production with autoplay silent loops and click-to-expand into a full player. Viewport intersection triggers so we don't burn bandwidth. HLS support with MP4 fallback for slow connections.

03
Month 3

Editorial + simple admin

Polished editing layer for the production team: upload video + cover, fill 5 structured fields (client, year, crew, credits, description), and publish. Faithful preview of the actual loop behaviour. No tickets, no training.

04
Month 4

Launch + monitoring

Legacy catalogue migrated via Migrate API with 301 redirects from the old URLs. Zero-downtime launch, Core Web Vitals monitoring through the first 4 weeks, and an editorial support plan so the team keeps publishing on its own.

§ 03 Results

What happened next

2
Languages
ES + EN
94
Perf
Lighthouse
§ 04 Lesson

Video sells better than stills in this industry — but only if the site doesn't ask the visitor to commit to "I'll click and wait". The silent loop removes that friction: it shows the pace of the work immediately, and the visitor decides if they want full-screen or sound, not us.

Is your audiovisual portfolio not showing what your work actually is?

The method applies if your production company, creative agency or studio needs each piece to speak for itself on the home — and the team to manage it without tickets.