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Web · Education and film, project with an international reach · May 2017

AWA

A video-led site, for a project that teaches through images.

AWA home page, a mosaic of video portraits

Key figures

of media in the database329 MB
served from one installation2 languages
between the first and last commit9 months

AWA carries a simple idea that is hard to lay out: teaching through images. So the site had to show before explaining. The home page is a mosaic of filmed portraits, all framed the same way against the same wall, which reads as a single image and plays as a single video.

The project in detail

The rest follows that logic: a page about the project, a page about its presence abroad, a page for those who want to work on it, and a contact page. The site is bilingual from the language switch in the header, with both versions served from the same installation.

Technically it is a 2017 WordPress built on a child theme written for the project, with three hundred and twenty-nine megabytes of media, mostly video thumbnails and field photography. Fifty-one commits between September 2016 and May 2017, a slow and steady rhythm that followed the shoots.

Bringing this site back up took a detour: its theme relied on a PHP 5 construct that became a fatal error in later versions. It had to be served on the interpreter of its own era to be seen as it was.

What was done

  1. 01

    Home page built as a mosaic of video portraits

  2. 02

    Bilingual site served from a single installation

  3. 03

    Child theme written for the project

  4. 04

    329 MB of media, video thumbnails and field photography

Frequently asked questions

How do you build a site whose main content is video?

By treating video as the layout itself, not as an inset. On AWA the home page is a grid of filmed portraits framed identically: it reads as a still image and plays as a video, with nothing else to distract.

Does a bilingual site mean two sites?

No. AWA served both languages from the same installation, with a switch in the header. That is the cheapest choice to maintain as long as both versions say the same thing.

Other work

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