FILM 35: a director’s website with an archive of 56 works
FILM 35 s.r.o.
2026-07-19
Miro Šindelka is a Slovak film director and producer based in Bratislava — two feature films, 22 documentaries, two animated shorts, over a hundred commercials, and 93 documentary films as a producer. All of that work used to live on a self-made 65-page Google Sites website. The brief: move the archive into a personal site that can be sent to a producer or a festival programmer without any explanation, that plays video directly on the page, and that keeps the original texts word for word. The client chose the premium option with custom scroll animations. The result is a bilingual website built around a single motif — the “RÁM 35” frame gate.
Director’s personal website + filmography archive
Project type
Turn 40 years of work into a verifiable online archive
Main goal
What we delivered:
- An archive of 56 works since 1986 with genre anchors
- Fourteen videos playing on the page, without leaving for YouTube
- A bilingual SK/EN build covering every work entry and the full CV
- A hero assembled from six stills of the director’s films
- Film posters in the selected-works section instead of the original photos
- Sixteen awards ordered “by hierarchy of importance”, in full wording
- Full festival names under the laurels in every archive row
- A wall of real advertising-client logos, grey until hover, then in colour
- A section for the TUCET television cycle with all six parts
- Galleries with visible arrow controls stepping one photo at a time
- Contact without a form: a large mailto link, the address, and five social profiles
- A cookie banner, two GDPR pages, and a layer for AI search engines
Selected screens and visuals
Visual project preview shows how the website looks on different devices. Responsive design ensures clear display on mobiles, tablets and desktops.
Screenshot 1 of 5
The non-trivial parts of the project
The client chose the premium option: custom scroll animations, video playing directly on the page, and the old texts carried over word for word. The hardest part was not the technology but the sheer volume and variety of an archive spanning almost forty years — 57 works of six different kinds, 16 awards, festival lists, and full credits that all had to stay readable on one site and in two languages.
- Problem #1
Fifty-seven works of six different kinds in one navigation
Features, documentaries, animation, a TV cycle, music videos, and producing credits each carry different metadata and different weight — a 1994 feature cannot sit in the same row as a music video from the same year. Sorting by year alone was never going to be enough.
Our solutionWe built a typed content model in which every kind of work has its own set of fields. The /tvorba page composes genre anchor sections, filters, and expandable rows with synopsis, credits, and gallery out of it — and the home page deep-links straight to an individual film.
Technologies and implementationTyped content model + anchor navigation + filters + deep links
- Problem #2
Video had to play on the site, not on YouTube
It was a direct condition of the premium option: a visitor should never have to leave the site to watch a trailer. There are fourteen videos across the site, and a standard embed would have pulled player scripts for every one of them before a single click.
Our solutionEvery video is built as a facade: until the first click only a framed preview image loads, and the youtube-nocookie player mounts on demand. Fourteen videos therefore cost the page nothing, and playback happens inside the “RÁM 35” frame itself.
Technologies and implementationFacade player + youtube-nocookie + on-demand mounting
- Problem #3
Migrating 65 Google Sites pages without losing a single line
The old site carried 57 work entries, 16 awards in their full wording, festival lists, complete credits — direction, screenplay, cinematography, music, editing, running time, format — and quotes from film critics. The client explicitly asked that his texts be carried over verbatim.
Our solutionInstead of redrawing 65 pages, we moved the facts into a typed content model. One work is one entry that renders from a single source into the list, into the detail view, and into the structured data — and English is another field, not a second copy of the site.
Technologies and implementationTyped content model + single source of truth + hand-written SK/EN i18n
- Problem #4
The showcase was curated by the director himself
Which stills open the site, which works belong in the selected-works section, and what order the 16 awards run in were the author’s calls, not the designer’s. The hero had to stand on exactly the six stills he picked, the photos in “Selected works” had to become film posters, the awards had to follow “the hierarchy of importance” in his own wording, and the commercials section had to show the real client logos.
Our solutionSelection, order, and cover images became data rather than markup: the hero takes a list of stills, selected works take posters, and the awards render in exactly the order of the array. That is why every round of edits went through without any refactoring — the content changed, not the code. The advertiser logos sit in grey and take on colour on hover.
Technologies and implementationContent model with curated ordering + a separate cover field + logo wall
- Problem #5
A site with no form, no CMS, and no analytics still has to be found
Contact is deliberately a single email address, there is no admin interface, and no analytics was installed. That means the site has no way of announcing itself other than through how machines read it — search engines and, just as often nowadays, language models being asked about a filmography.
Our solutionWe built an SEO/AEO layer: structured data for Person, Organization with ProductionCompany, WebSite, BreadcrumbList, and an ItemList of Movie entries; a sitemap with hreflang for both language branches; robots with an explicit allow for fifteen AI crawlers; and /llms.txt with a machine-readable summary of the filmography.
Technologies and implementationJSON-LD (Person, Organization, WebSite, BreadcrumbList, Movie) + sitemap with hreflang + robots for AI crawlers + /llms.txt
Similar problems in your business? We will help you solve them with modern tech stack.
Final structure
Complete web structure designed for clear navigation and a simple path to contact or order. Each page has clear purpose and optimized navigation.
- Home — director’s portrait
- /tvorba — full filmography with genre anchors
- /studio — the FILM 35 production and creative studio
- /zasady-cookies and /en/cookie-policy
- An English mirror of every page under /en
- sitemap.xml, robots.txt, and /llms.txt
Most important website sections
Each section solved specific business problem and increased conversions
- 01
An opening screen built from six stills
A full-screen crossfade of six black-and-white stills, the name MIRO ŠINDELKA above it, the kicker “REŽISÉR & PRODUCENT — BRATISLAVA”, and a line of six fields of work. All the stills come from the director’s films.
- 02
Selected works as a typographic list
Seven works — Zostane to medzi nami, Vášnivý bozk, … a tak som začal utekať, Chvenie, Napísané, Veľká potreba, and the TUCET cycle — presented not as cards but as a list with film posters and a vertical filmstrip tied to the scroll position.
- 03
Mini-landing pages for the features
Zostane to medzi nami (2003) and Vášnivý bozk (1994) each received a full-bleed composition of their own: synopsis, a critic’s quote, the numbers (“30 festivals worldwide” and 121,447 cinema admissions in Slovakia and Czechia), a mono credits table, a gallery, and the trailer.
- 04
A work archive with genre anchors
The /tvorba page holds the entire filmography since 1986: expandable rows with synopses, credits, galleries, and full festival names under the laurels, plus anchor sections for feature / documentary / animation / TV / music video / producing.
- 05
The TUCET cycle and the producer section
At the client’s request we added a dedicated section for the TUCET television cycle with all six parts and their real posters; it leads into a statement about the 93 documentary films produced at the FILM FACTORY studio.
Project stack
Framework and interface
A dark interface with zero radius, fully responsive from 320 px, with no glassmorphism, shadows, or gradients.
- App Router and Proxy instead of middleware
- CSS-first Tailwind v4
- No horizontal overflow at 320–430 px
- TypeScript
- React 19
- Next.js 16
- Tailwind CSS v4
Motion and typography
Eight permitted motion devices, smooth scrolling, and two type families: an expanded grotesque for display and a mono for credits.
- prefers-reduced-motion on every animation
- Archivo with a variable width axis
- Latin-ext subsets for diacritics
- framer-motion 12
- Lenis 1.3
- Archivo (variable, wdth)
- IBM Plex Mono
Content and bilingual layer
No CMS and no forms: the content is a typed model of 57 work entries, the SK/EN i18n is hand-written without a library, and Slovak lives on the bare domain.
- Contact as a mailto link, not a form
- Video playback without leaving for YouTube
- Mirrored SK/EN path switching
- Custom i18n SK/EN
- Typed content model
- YouTube facade (youtube-nocookie)
- mailto contact
SEO, AEO, and operations
The layer that makes the director’s facts quotable: a sitemap with hreflang, robots with an explicit allow for 15 AI crawlers, /llms.txt, and structured data including a list of films.
- JSON-LD Person, Organization, WebSite, Movie
- Cookie banner and two GDPR pages
- Branch previews, production from the main branch
- JSON-LD (Person, Organization, Movie)
- llms.txt
- PWA manifest
- Silktide Consent Manager
- Vercel
- GitLab CI
Modern tech stack = fast website + easy maintenance + long-term support
Delivery process
The client asked for an “intro first, then the rest” sequence, so we worked in short rounds: every set of requirements was broken down into points, implemented, and sent back for sign-off.
- Phase 1
Migrating the old content
6–7 July 2026From the 65 Google Sites pages we pulled texts, posters, and photographs and moved them into a typed content model — 57 work entries, the CV, the awards, and the contacts. Part of the material could only be recovered by downloading directly from the original URLs while the old site was still live.
- Phase 2
Design direction and signature motif
6–8 July 2026Before the first component was written we defined the design system: the projection-room metaphor, the “RÁM 35” motif, colour tokens taken from the client’s logo, two type families, and an eight-item motion vocabulary. Only then did we build the skeleton of the home page and /tvorba.
- Phase 3
Filmography and film details with video
8–12 July 2026We added the detailed compositions for both features, the documentary trilogy, the category index, and the music-video strip. Video uses a facade pattern: the preview loads as an image and the player mounts only on click, so the visitor never leaves for YouTube.
- Phase 4
Rounds of edits: contacts, hero, awards
8–20 July 2026The core of the project. Feedback came in several waves. We removed the phone number and WhatsApp from the contacts, rewrote the awards list, and dropped the year and genre from archive entries. The hero was assembled from six stills of the director’s films, photos in the selected-works section were replaced with film posters, a TUCET section with all six parts was added, and the galleries gained visible arrow controls stepping one photo at a time. The 16 awards were reordered “by hierarchy of importance” in their full wording, and real advertising-client logos were added, shifting from grey to colour on hover. Finally, the full festival names appeared under the laurels.
- Phase 5
SEO/AEO layer, cookies, and handover
17–20 July 2026, final polish 12–13 August 2026We completed the sitemap with hreflang, robots with an explicit allow for 15 AI crawlers, /llms.txt, the structured data, the PWA manifest, the cookie banner, and two GDPR pages. Every work received a separate cover field, independent of the gallery, so the client decides the cover still himself, including for the photographs from filming in Nairobi and at the Vatican. The lead image can be swapped at any time with a single line of content.
Project FAQ
Why does the site have no CMS and no contact form?
The content is an archive that changes rarely and always in agreement with the director, so it lives in typed files inside the repository — it loads instantly and cannot be broken by accident. Contact is intentionally narrow: one large email link instead of a form, since collaboration is decided in conversation anyway. For the same reason, no analytics was installed on the site.
How does video play without leaving for YouTube?
Instead of an embedded player, the page first loads only a facade — a static preview with a play button and a note that clicking will start the video. The youtube-nocookie player mounts on click and plays right inside the section’s frame. The page stays faster and the visitor stays on the site.
How was the 65-page Google Sites migration handled?
The texts were carried over verbatim, as the client asked, and split into a structured model: work, year, category, synopsis, credits, festivals, gallery. The images had to be pulled directly from the original URLs — the exported files turned out to be unusable. The result is 57 work entries and a CV that can be translated and sorted without any manual rewriting.
What is the AI-search layer for?
So the director’s facts are quoted correctly. The site ships /llms.txt with a machine-readable summary, robots with an explicit allow for 15 named AI crawlers, and structured data of type Person, Organization, WebSite, plus a list of films. When someone asks a language model about Miro Šindelka’s filmography, there is a reliable source to draw on.
How does the site work on mobile?
The same as on a large screen, only recomposed: the name wraps to two lines above the title plate, the filmography runs in a single column, and galleries are driven by visible arrows. The layout was checked at widths from 320 to 768 px and horizontal overflow is ruled out. Every animation respects the system reduced-motion setting.
Years of work behind you and nowhere to show it properly?
For directors, photographers, studios, and production companies we can organize a large body of work so that it is easy to browse and easy to cite: a clear hierarchy of works, video on the page itself, a bilingual build, and a design that never competes with the work.
Leave your contact (email or phone is enough)
An archive with every detail intact • Video on the page • Bilingual