Catherine Lutes – Cinematographer
I created a portfolio website over the weekend for Catherine Lutes, an amazing cinematographer now working out of Toronto, who lensed Jamie Travis’ amazing Patterns Trilogy, as well as his new short film, The Armoire, which screened at TIFF09 and will be screened at Sundance in a couple of weeks.
The focus with this design was to get something clean and functional and to get it done quickly. I drew out a design on Friday afternoon and spent Saturday afternoon getting the design into code. Since it was meant to be a simple portfolio website where people could come and watch some of Catherine’s amazing work, I made an extra effort to ensure that no matter how you came at the site, whether it be iPhone, IE6 or with Javascript turned off, you could still get at the videos, while providing a cool viewing experience for the majority of users.
I also wanted her to be able to add new work to the site easily so I added a WordPress backend to it and a few plugins and techniques that I learned recently while deep into the WordPress codebase for several other sites, my own included. Of particular usefulness is the Custom Fields Template plugin that allows you to easily setup a set of fields that are easier to use for the average user than the completely opaque default WordPress custom fields thing. I also used the post thumbnails feature, which is brand new in the latest release of WordPress.
I’m pretty happy with the end result and I think Catherine is as well, which was the goal. As a fan of her work, it’s cool to get the chance to turn the tables and get her to be a fan of mine. Hopefully it helps her make connections while she’s at Sundance and beyond.
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