Here’s a recent project that came together very nicely.
The Drama School graduating actors perform a showcase of short scenes in California, NYC and here in New Haven. Starting last year we supported the event with a web site to list the event. The site includes a dedicated portfolio page for each actor with a resume, production shots, and for the first time this year vocal samples.
This project seems like an ideal situation for some type of CMS, but so far its remained a traditional static page design. There’s only 16 actors in the group, and once I calculate the time needed to design the CMS it doesn’t seem to hit the cost-benefit ratio. And there is enough minor variation in each actor’s page, particularly in the resume’s, that I think the CMS would limit us. The pages are mostly alike, but its the little details that add up.
But I don’t do this all by myself, and its the project team that makes it work so well. For the visual design I hire Tom Shultz of Creative Attitude to create a set of templates. For the actors I set them each up with a resume template and a folder on our departmental server to store their production photos. The template is an html table that I store at an MS Word document. So I’ve got both ends covered. To put it all together I copy out the template files to a separate directory for each actor. Their resume document gets its Word formating stripped out, and then I copy and paste the remaining html table into the resume template. The styles are already all set in the style sheet. There is always a little extra hand-cleaning, but it goes quickly. The biggest chore is resizing the images — I could use some Photoshop automation, but I like to take extra care to insure all the crops show off the images to their best. But once the photos are renamed according to the standard schema the gallery page pretty much takes care of itself. So the whole process, while repetitive, goes pretty smoothly.
The new addition this year is the vocal samples. One of our dialog teachers mentioned that this year she’d gotten the class to create short, lively vocal pieces, and she wondered if they could be included on the showcase site. In some other recent project work I’d come across this nice Flash-based audio player, and this seemed like a perfect place to use it. There was already some extra room on the page, and the vocal samples fit right in.
And the response from the students has been great — they’re very excited about the site, and appreciative of all the work that goes into it. And ultimately its happy clients that we’re all aiming for!
Yale School of Drama | The Showcase of the Class of 2007
Powered by ScribeFire.
ADD YOUR COMMENT
Comments are moderated.
Randall Rode's online home for thoughts, notes, and experiments with a wide range of technology topics. Visit the about page for info on my recent projects and professional background. I welcome your comments!
New articles are normally posted on Mondays and Wednesdays. Subscribe to the RSS feed or the email update to keep current on the latest posts.
Past listings from 2004 to the present
Need a home (or better home) for your website? I highly recommend HostRocket -- they are the best!
