Cinematographer's portfolio that earns its film grain honestly.
A young DP with a strong reel and a portfolio site that hosted his work as embedded YouTube videos with the suggested-videos sidebar showing other people's reels at the end. Bad. Embarrassing. Career-shortening.
He needed a portfolio that treats his footage with the respect it deserves — and an aesthetic that matches his actual visual sensibility, which is amber, crimson, gold, and a lot of grain.
Built a custom video player on Cloudflare Stream — adaptive bitrate, no third-party logos, no recommended-videos sidebar, no ads. The reel is the only thing on screen.
Set the type: Fraunces with WONK on max for the wordmark, sized large enough to feel like a title card. JetBrains Mono for credits and timestamps, small caps, tight tracking.
Color world: deep amber, crimson, antique gold. Grain texture overlay on hero sections, dialed to about 4% — enough to feel filmic, not enough to be a costume.
"The fastest way to make a cinematographer's site feel cheap is to host the reel on YouTube."
Live. Hosted on his own infrastructure. Client inquiries up. The site treats his work the way the work deserves to be treated.