How we built a video streaming experience featuring new and upcoming films from the festival circuit.
The Cirquit is a Netflix-like, on-demand streaming platform that features films currently making the festival rounds. Filmmakers submit their work and industry leaders browse for films that they would like to program or distribute.
Planning
The client approached me wih a detailed brief for a Minimum Viable Product (MVP) that would connect filmmakers with festivals and other industry organizations. The product has a potential to vastly improve the process of application, discovery and selection of new and upcoming films and filmmakers.
We organized a week-long brainstorming and planning phase, where the client, myself and the developers met and worked every day to refine the brief, determine technology and system architecture, and evaluate SaaS providers we’d leverage for The Cirquit.
We also took advantage of these on-site kickoff sessions to quickly explore user experience concepts, user flow and iterate on major design elements.
Development
The initial development for the MVP took three months, and was organized in an agile fashion with weekly meetings with the client to evaluate progress and update priorities. This allowed us to quickly respond to strategy shifts based on user feedback, and hit important business goals such as providing a limited-feature demo for an important industry conference.
We set up a continuous integration (CI) system in place, with automated tests helping ensure code quality and an automated one-command deployment procedure, which allowed us a quick turnaround and helped the client gain more visibility into the process and results.
We designed the platform as a client-server architecture. The backend implements a REST API that the frontend (a single-page JavaScript application) uses to deliver functionality within a modern movie streaming platform UI. We used Vimeo as the video backend, Stripe for payments, and the application is hosted on Amazon Web services infrastructure.
The Cirquit will help filmmakers publicize their films and make it easier for them to reach festival programmers. It will also streamline film discovery for festivals and industry organizations.
