While it may seem like it’s already everywhere, video is the new kid on the internet media block. The rich, good-looking, smart new kid with a bright future and a car, but still, compared to the photography club nerds and the moody creative writers, video’s barely out of the blocks.

That might be why, despite how much surplus design talent is currently devoted to the production of portfolio-centric site templates for the budding web designer, photographer, graphic designer, et al., the poor, misunderstood filmmaker and videographer get stuck with only a handful of options. Creating a good and good looking portfolio site for video is such a unique and specific task, there just aren’t that many people doing it.

“You put a new piece of work on your site / release a DVD / have a short film featured in a festival. Pick only one of the following scenarios: A) 1000 people who think you’re talented all check it out. B) Nobody gives a shit.”

So what do you do? One thing you don’t do is create a traditional video portfolio site. You’ve seen those. They spawn tiny flash windows with structured interfaces and lumbering loading graphics. They beep, slide and wipe their way to tiny thumbnail video files that require you to have your nose an inch from the screen just to see clearly. Flash is great (and great for video), but as we’ve learned over the past couple of years, when a site is 100% flash you’re lucky if 10% of visitors make it past your snazzy load screen before clicking the back button. You still see tons of flash portfolios by really talented, working pros (Mara Shiavocampo, for example, via newsvideographer.net), and there are even templates to help you create them (run, far away, from anything with a film reel graphic), but that doesn’t mean you should ignore all common sense and progress and build one yourself.

Video portfolio sites need to be 3 things:

• They need to be easy to update. Sure it looks great now, but if it’s such a hassle to add new content you only do it once a year (or 3), you might as well be mailing around brochures.
• They need to be accessible. I don’t necessarily mean accessible for the sensorially impaired, I mean they need to be easy to use. People won’t really give a shit about your sliding menus and clever category names if it’s not immediately obvious how to watch a video as soon as they load your site.
• They need to make their own gravy. That doesn’t necessarily mean they have to make money for you, it means that your portfolio site needs to tell people how and why they can hire you, contact you, become regular viewers, distribute your work, buy your DVDs, suggest stories, star in your next film, whatever. Your site should be working to create a base of people who are into your work, who will check something out when you ask them to, or who will share your work with others. Don’t think you need this? You put a new piece of work on your site/release a DVD/have a short film featured in a festival. Pick only one of the following scenarios: A) 1000 people who think you’re talented all check it out. B) Nobody gives a shit.

Using a video community site to host your videos

Of course it doesn’t have to be that complicated. If your original idea was to just "throw a couple videos online" so your clients/distributors/friends could have some samples to look at there are lots of easy and straightforwards ways to get your work out there. YouTube and Vimeo allow you to create a profile page and upload your work at a decent resolution, and are in fact great backend alternatives to compressing and hosting your own quicktime or .flv files. This very site uses YouTube to host and serve the HD video content and embed text.

Beyond just saving you the bandwidth, using an existing video community site as a backend has the advantage of both allowing your work to disseminate through the community site’s normal channels (favouriting, commenting, etc), but also registering all your viewers in a single tally. Having 5000 views for all to see on YouTube is infinitely more useful and satisfying than having only 500 public views but 4500 views seen only in your site’s stats analytics program.

There are definitely cons to serving your content through a site like YouTube or Vimeo (and believe me there are some big Vimeo cons) but that’s another article. Whether it’s on YouTube, Vimeo or your own server, for now let’s assume you have video and you’re ready to build an online portfolio for it.

Deciding between Wordpress, Wordpress and Wordpress. Oh, and Tumblr.

Wordpress is far and away the most useful, versatile and powerful tool for displaying your video work online. Not only does it just make sense to use a content management system instead of a series of static webpages to run your portfolio site (see rule #1, above), there are lots of decent themes available, and the CMS itself is not so occult that someone with a decent understanding of CSS and HTML can’t figure out how to customize, implement or even develop designs from scratch quickly. There are lot of other options (Joomla, Drupal, Movable Type) but you can’t throw a stone on the web without hitting a support forum or tutorial for Wordpress, and some great design work has already been done on video-centric themes, so unless you like making work for yourself I’m going to just say: Wordpress. Let’s move on.

Free Wordpress themes

God, if I had a penny for every google return on that search phrase. The world of free Wordpress themes is like like a big burlap sack of monkey turds, with a few chocolate covered ju jubes thrown in — not only do you have to root through a bag of monkey turds to find the sweets, you always feel there’s something not quite right about chocolate covered ju jubes. That isn’t to say there aren’t some stunning freebies out there (check out hongkiat.com’s list here for some great examples), just that while there are tons of free Wordpress themes that are "video friendly", the problem is that, like chocolate covered ju jubes, they’re never quite right. Either the video isn’t featured enough, isn’t accessible enough, or the theme is just plain ugly. The problem is that most of them are meant to be themes with videos, as opposed to themes for videos. And while you can definitely retrofit any theme for video, I’d personally like a more elegant solution.

The Videographer theme: the only (free) game in town

In 2008 Shane Navratil of Zoomstart.com developed a free theme for Wordpress called Videographer (details, live demo). It’s a simple but elegant theme that display thumbnails and synopses of your work in the left hand column, and a list of your latest videos, search bar, etc, in the right. Clicking on an item will take you to a post page in which the embedded YouTube video (thanks to a third party plugin) is displayed. Another plugin allows viewers to rate your videos, and that list can then be fed back to the sidebar via a widget.

It’s a nice, straightforward design, and you could do a lot worse than to use the Videographer theme to showcase your work. The problem with it (and this is such a common problem with Wordpress themes) is that the graphic design elements that really draw you to the theme are just placeholders. The fancy, pastel-coloured tile graphic in the right column that holds the whole design of the page together isn’t going to be there when you implement the theme on your own site (unless you want to run a giant ad for the videographer theme in your sidebar). This on its own isn’t necessarily a bad thing, but it means that you’re responsible for coming up with a graphic design element on which the entire site is going to hang. That’s easier said than done, especially with such a minimalist site. The graphical tiled box should have been a background, with the blog title and catchline displayed overtop so that at very least you could keep the design intact and still be able to personalize the site.

Coupled with the lack of out of the box text blogging support for news and announcements, the graphic design issue makes the Videographer theme useful only as the simplest of solutions for the filmmaker or videographer, or a skeleton on which to build a more robust site. At that point though, you might want to just start from scratch.

Premium Wordpress themes

In Wordpress parlance, "premium" means "costs money". Premium wordpress theme development is the microstock of the web design community, and a slew of sites sell themes of varying quality and originality for widely varying prices. For filmmakers and videographers, however, the choices are significantly more limited.

While there are several video-specific premium themes for Wordpress, they all suffer in one way or another from the chocolate ju jubes syndrome — they never seem exactly right. Of course that’s probably because they were designed by web designers based on existing video sites like hulu.com, rather than by videographers looking to showcase their work. Want to write two paragraph descriptions for your videos instead of one? Oops, that totally fucks up the flow of the sidebar. Want to have titles longer than 30 characters? Oops, that blows that perfect little comment balloon right out of the design flow. Seduced by the Apple-esque "recent comments" widget but don’t want to display recent comments? Sorry Charlie, better just chop that code right out. Or when in doubt put a giant RSS logo in there — either one.

And of course that’s what ends up happening with a lot of people who buy premium video themes. Not happy to use it right out of the box, exactly as it was designed and intended, many people end up getting frustrated trying to squeeze their vision into a premium theme’s narrow box and just end up hacking and slashing at the theme until there’s nothing left but a featured content slider and a list of recent posts.

If you are thinking of investing in a premium theme however, here are your main options:

On Demand, Video Elements, TV Elements, Video Flick: The Press75 themes

Jason Schuller is obviously a graphic designer with great taste. He’s created some fantastic looking Wordpress themes, and is selling them through his Press75.com website for $75 USD a throw. Jason’s themes, however, are terrible for falling apart visually under your own content. It’s not that they stop working, it just means if you want it to look as pixel perfect as the demo, you had better use titles and descriptions exactly the same length as he does. Another huge annoyance with Press75.com themes, considering their price, is that there is no automatic thumbnail or featured image resizing. Like those perfect little thumbnails and those great wall-to-wall coda slider? Better be prepared to fire up Photoshop every time you post a new video.

On Demand (live demo) is "inspired" to put it politely by Hulu.com, and is probably the most functional, well structured and full featured video theme on the market. It uses the coda slider plugin for a sliding features section, has clean, thumbnailed video category pages, a scalable video play area that will handle any size embedded video, and comes with a working blog section out of the box. This site, at one point in its life, was going to be an On Demand site, and you can definitely see the similarities (how the guy and I managed to both redesign our sites using zygat3r’s dark wood background and transparency I can’t explain — creepy!).

If I have a qualm about On Demand it’s that I’ve seen about a dozen installations of the theme now and without the placeholder graphics it always strikes me how plain or shabby the sites look compared to the live demo. I like sites like Lo Fi St. Louis, but it’s the exception. Most On Demand installations end up looking something like Torley Lives (no offense dude — I love the logo!). What’s funny is that hulu.com itself kind of looks like a crappy On Demand installation.

Another thing I found frustrating about On Demand as a CSS designer is that it is an orgy of divs. A huge freeway pileup of divs. An absolute rainforest of divs that needs to be clearcut. There are divs for everything, some styled, some not. There are divs with classes that go nowhere. Divs with different names that are styled the same. Divs inside of divs inside of divs inside of divs. Infinity divs. This is not a lightweight theme, and I have to assume that neither are his other ones.

Video Elements (live demo) is another beautiful theme that was designed before it was planned. A complex but well proportioned main page boasts a coverflow-esque featured content area, thumbnailed sidebar, and a list of videos in the main column along with a thumb, comments link and rating. If this theme has a failing it’s that it uses a jquery lightbox style effect to display videos. In a way that’s nice — it lets you really focus on the video content without the distractions of the page. On the other hand it really makes the video content secondary to the rest of the site. Also, you had better be ready to write some multi paragraph descriptions if you want your version to look like the demo.

TV Elements (live demo) is kind of Video Elements’ mirror image — great up-front video presentation, not great browsing and content listing capabilities. I like TV Elements’ Blip.tv-style player. I like how it suggests more content in the little stage sidebar. I like how you can then go and browse through thumbnails and pocket descriptions of all the videos on a separate…. Oh. You can’t do that. For some reason there’s no category or full-page video listing, except in the farty little sidebar beside the video player. If your newest content is far more important than your older content, this is a great theme, but for many of us that little oversight in planning makes this theme frustratingly limited.

Video Flick (live demo) obviously takes its inspiration from Apple’s movie trailers site, and it does an admirable enough job. This theme would be at its best serving video files without a lot of accompanying text. You go to the page, you see a bunch of thumbs, you click one and it lightboxes you up a video, you click close, rinse, repeat. There are pages for descriptions and and comments, but can you find them? The trick is clicking on the titles, not the thumbnails. This is a theme that can’t seem to decide whether it wants descriptions or not. If they’re that tricky to find people just won’t bother. I like Video Flick, just not for $75. There are cool, free ways to do this, like with Hasaportfolio.com’s Tumblr Portfolio.

Elegantthemes.com’s eVid

I’m skeptical about anything that starts with a lowercase "e" or "i", but here we are. eVid (details, live demo) from elegantthemes.com. I’ll admit I really like this guy’s work. His site works on a subscription model, so for a measly $19.95 USD per year you get access to all of his themes. They’re universally slick and well designed, and while eVid is his only video offering, at $19.95 for the whole shooting match it’s still a quarter the price of On Demand.

eVid is another Hulu.com clone, so if you followed the links above it should look pretty familiar to you. It boasts admin-controlled advertising blocks, automated thumbnail resizing, manual lightboxing and a custom video player. It’s pretty impressive, especially considering the price.

eVid’s big drawback for me, besides there being no out of the box text blog functionality and it being, well, a hulu clone, is that there isn’t a lot of pointer feedback in the site. Unlike On Demand, eVid uses a transparency layer and overlaid text on its thumbnails, and it always takes me a few seconds to figure out where the hell I’m supposed to click to open the video page up. Nothing lights up. Nothing underlines when you mouse over it. It’s a minor gripe, and it could be fixed in in the css in a matter of seconds, but still.

Quommunication.com’s Video theme

At first glance there doesn’t seem to be that much to get excited about over Quommunication.com’s $75 USD plain Jane Video theme (details, live demo), except some fancy "appears as you type" comment trick. But the more time I spend reading about it and clicking around the demo site, the more I like it. This is definitely a "no frills" video theme, and as such it’s probably better suited to producers who generate lots of short content and just want to keep viewers moving through it. In that way it’s very similar to press75.com’s TV Elements, and the two themes share the same limitation — no good way to visually skim lots of videos at once for the ones that interest you. Ironic, considering Quommunications pimps categorization as one of Video’s major features. I’m not sure how Video handles more than a few categories.

Beyond the clever comments system, Video’s claims to fame are ease of use and lightweight code. Video, unlike so many other premium Wordpress themes, doesn’t use plugins, which can significantly speed a Wordpress site up by limiting the number of queries it has to make to the database. And the code is very nice. It’s not a tabled layout in disguise (see On Demand, above). It doesn’t rely on jpeg backgrounds for the majority of its structure. It’s a site you could happily load in your iPhone (if iPhone supported embedded flash video).

The way you post content in Video is great. No custom fields where you have to input fixed paths to thumbnails, no scrolling around looking for where the embed code goes. Click "new post", paste your embed code right into the post, follow it up with a short description, pick a category and hit "publish". Voila.

The downside to Video is that there’s no option for out of the box text blog support for news updates and the like. This is a common problem with video themes. I get why it isn’t there — it’s a video theme! But the option should be there. A creative solution would be to have a video channel for news and to actually produce videos instead of posts, but that’s a hell of a lot more work than typing "Hey! I’ve been awarded the Victor Nightengale award for excellence in punctuality! Check it out!"

I can’t overstate this: for a video theme to be taken seriously as a business building tool, it needs to do more than show videos. Come on, developers, use your heads.

Graph Paper Press’s High-Def theme

High-Def (details, live demo) is a "child theme" for the Modularity theme framework, all by Thad Allender at Graph Paper Press. It’s a little confusing, but the Modularity theme goes for $75 USD, and while it doesn’t specifically say so, the High-Def child theme seems to be available for free once you buy Modularity. You can also join GPP’s theme club for $99 USD a year. Don’t quote me on any of that, because as with almost any overly clever new system of classification and organization, this "theme framework" business makes things far more confusing than they need to be.

I’m a little bit leery of this theme. It seems a bit like a photography theme with a flash video player bolted on. Clicking around the demo reveals no video integration in the theme. Sure there’s a video embedded in one of the posts, but that’s not exactly integration. In fact none of the other posts in the demo even have videos in them, and some of them don’t even have photographs that correspond to the featured thumbnail. And on that subject, notice the thumbnail for the video post doesn’t correspond to the video’s poster frame.

GPP has had some success with themes for photographers, notably with the similar f8 theme. High-Def seems like an incomplete idea though — more like a working sketch of what the f8 theme would look like if it were redesigned for video, rather than a workable video portfolio theme.

I love grid layouts and magazine style websites as much as the next guy, but not if it’s all for its own sake. Plus what’s going on with that footer? For all the work it would take to make this theme do what you wanted it to do, you could probably just build it from scratch. I’d steer clear for the moment.

WooTube

Ah WooTube (details, live demo), yet another ill conceived "video friendly" port of another theme rushed to market to cash in on the multimedia blog craze. Woo Themes has taken their Busy Bee text blog theme, slapped on a custom video embed field, pilfered some kid’s awesome 3d showreel to impress you with in their demo, and now they want you to fork over $70 USD for the privilege of discovering all this for yourself.

WooTube’s index page displays the latest post with video up top, voting, description and then comments at the bottom. A sidebar let’s you scroll through video titles (without thumbs or description), or click on the category list, popular videos or tags.

Here’s how poorly thought out this theme is: When you click on one of the categories, instead of taking you to a list or thumb view of all the videos in that category (and each of the categories in Woo’s demo has multiple posts), you are taken to a page which, like the index page, shows only the latest video in that category, in single page view. Seriously. There are categories, and there are videos in those categories, just nobody at Woo thought to make them actually display. You can click the "Archives" link in the menu up top but that takes you to a text-only page that shows the last 30 post titles and the categories list again. Click on those categories and guess where they take you? Right to the single post page of the latest thing in that category.

Woo is a big brand in premium themes, and while the whole premium themes idea is a bit scammy considering the real work — the ongoing development and support of Wordpress itself — is 100% GNU GPL (that means free), you’d expect a bit more from them. WooTube is such a poor effort you have to wonder if Woo thinks we’re complete idiots.

Awesome, easy and free: Hasaportfolios.com’s Tumblr Portfolio

All of the portfolios I’ve been describing here have been fairly full featured. In fact my main complaint about themes (besides being poorly thought out) has been that they’re not full featured enough. Hasaportfolio.com’s Tumblr Portfolio (details, live demo) is pretty basic. It’s a single page with a simple header, footer, and 3×3 grid of content windows each of which can hold an image or video, a title, and a "more" button. Everything displays in chronological order. Everything has equal weight. You can play embedded videos inside the little windows, or click more and go to the post’s individual page on which you can watch the video and also read a description.

That’s it.

What I love about Hasaportfolio. com’s Tumblr Portfolio is that if you’re going to have a simple, no-frills embedded video portfolio site, here’s a well designed way to get it up and running in a matter of minutes, for free. Tumblr Portfolio, as you can probably guess, runs on Tumblr, which you can register for for free and provides a hosted subdomain to run your site from. And while that may seem less professional than having your own domain and a big flashy content slider (and it ultimately is, just not as much as you might think), there’s a big trend in the commercial arts to integrating your portfolio into an existing social networking or blogging framework, like Tumblr. Content is definitely king, so you’re better having an amazing video portfolio on Tumblr than you are having a shit video portfolio on an On Demand site.

The Tumblr Portfolio itself is simply a text file that you paste into a window in your Tumblr dashboard. There’s a round corners and a square corners version, and if you’re really hung up on the Tumblr subdomain thing you can get a free subdomain from hasaportfolio.com, so you can be chrisframpton.hasaportfolio.com if you want. Clever!

What’s better is that Tumblr is even easier to customize than Wordpress. There are lots of great examples of customized Tumblr Portfolios on Hasaportfolio.com’s site. Tumblr Portfolio is a great free alternative to things like press75.com’s Video Flick theme.

Or just do it from scratch

The most frustrating, time consuming but ultimately satisfying option might be to just design your portfolio site from scratch, and build it using whatever resources you’re comfortable with, whether that’s CSS, Flash, Ruby on Rails, Wordpress or whatever, or else hire a professional web designer whose work you like to design and build it for you. Web designers, even ones that produce amazing work, are sometimes surprisingly inexpensive to hire. Alternately going completely DIY forces you to improve your web design and development skills, which believe me is never going to be a bad thing in the future of media.

A custom site I really like is Hotbed Media’s. It’s straightforward, slick, and does exactly what you’d want it to do because it was designed for the people who use it.

Ultimately putting your film or video portfolio online is an exercise in compromises — in time, money, design, quality and functionality. Keeping in mind your portfolio site’s goals, accepting that you don’t have to be Dreamworks to be taken seriously, and making great content are what’s going to make the difference between a site that generates interest and a site that nobody cares about.

9 Responses to “Creating a portfolio site for filmmakers and videographers”

1. Eric says:

   February 4, 2009 at 5:12 pm

   “Or when in doubt put a giant RSS logo in there” – HAHAHAHAH

   Reply
2. Phil Thomas Di Giulio says:

   February 5, 2009 at 10:52 pm

   Great information! Thanks for all of the info. Might I suggest uploading your video portfolio to WellcomeMat? WellcomeMat connects filmmakers and videographers with clients looking to shoot local video ads (real estate, small business, etc.). Shooters can also manage their clients via the service. I’m not going to lie, I’m biased (Co-Founder). That said, i have shooters across the country making a living leveraging WellcomeMat much like a seller might leverage eBay. Should you have any questions, hit me up (via email) anytime! Oh and we’vve been in business since 2005.

   Thanks for the post Flyweight. Rock on!

   Reply
3. Phil Thomas Di Giulio says:

   February 5, 2009 at 10:55 pm

   Almost forgot, here’s a real videographer’s showcase page:
   http://www.wellcomemat.com/ny/woodside/videographer/jesse-gebryel/members-showcase/jesse_gebryel.html

   Reply
4. Chris Frampton says:

   May 23, 2009 at 8:51 am

   There are new templates and tools being developed every day for portfolio display, and the always smashing Smashing Magazine has recently done a new list of their “Top 100 free Wordpress themes”, and it includes some great portfolio-specific designs.

   One in particular — Jason Schuller’s Folio Elements — really blows me away. If you’re looking for a simple, slick way to display your demo reels or videos, this WP theme is both wicked and free. Check out the live demo.

   Reply
   • shortcinema says:

     October 10, 2009 at 7:47 pm

     @Chris Frampton – Thanks so much for pointing out the
     “Jason Schuller’s Folio Elements” It is amazing!

     Flyweight, thank you for the post. It seems I keep finding the same themes
     during my search. This is the fourth site listing many of the same themes
     but at least you gave thorough reviews. You are right about is Hotbed Media’s.
     It’s way closer to what I am looking for a portfolio site. (until I saw Schuller’s) “Quommunication” is my fave so far my serial project.

     Reply
     • shortcinema says:

       October 11, 2009 at 6:00 am

       @Chris Frampton – Oh Well.
       I downloaded “Jason Schuller’s Folio Elements”
       Everything looks great EXCEPT I cannot get the video to play on the site.

       My search continues.

       Reply
5. A says:

   October 1, 2009 at 9:00 am

   Thanks for a great article. I was google searching this topic and I was like “Yes! Exactly!” as soon as I started reading your critique of traditional video portfolio sites. And it was great to see all the reviews of the templates.

   Reply
6. Boots Sale Free Shipping says:

   December 8, 2009 at 9:33 pm

   Congrats Jennifer! Your purses are SO pretty and that daughter! ADORABLE!

   Reply
7. Shira79 says:

   February 8, 2010 at 5:44 am

   Had to drop a comment and say thanks for such a well-researched, informative and beautifully written article. Hard to find those these days..

   Reply

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