Many don't know this, but I have another website (well, a few, actually) called Sparrow Films. I love this website. Visitors can access all of my video-related projects in their original quality, for free. It's pretty cool. That being said, I'm making changes to the website. Changes that, despite it's near zero monthly visitors, are quite drastic.
Why the change?
Money. It's as simple as that. Sparrow Films isn't free to run, nor is it an easy website to troubleshoot/maintain. The cost was initially negligable, especially since I was actively working on multiple projects. Now that I'm working on less projects at once, the need, and frankly desire, to host my videos on my own website isn't there. Couple that with the cost, both monetarily and mentally, and the choice was pretty clear.
On the mental aspect, security is another major factor. I'm a nervous guy by nature, and having a website open to the public, accessing so many API's, was quite terrifying. Even at my scale (again, near zero), I was petrified during each of the recent outages and exploits discovered/disclosed. These events made me reconsider my approach, not only to Sparrow Films, but to all of my websites.
The New Sparrow Films
From this abundance of caution came an interesting idea. A new design, completely fresh and out of left field. Since it's inception, and even before it, Sparrow Films has been dominated by the Feather & blue gradient+navy background. I'm not joking, you can literally trace it all the way back to the Dapolito Film days. This radical new design completely sheds the blue in favor of a vibrant crimson orange with an entirely new wordmark and logo.
Visiting the newly designed homepage, things only become more dramatic. Reading like a social media feed, each film is posted the moment it's released, with descriptions, posters, and watch links. Unlike the previous iteration, choosing to watch a film routes to Sparrow Films YouTube Channel, which is the only account that films from Sparrow Films will be posted from. As a result, each film's detail page has been updated to show more relevant information to the video.
Every other page of the website has also been redesigned to match the new design perfectly. Other changes include simplifying everything related to image syncing and caching, as well as cleanup of old/unused code.
What this means for Sparrow Films
Right now, nothing. Sparrow Films is still kicking around. In fact, I'm in the middle of a project right now called EXPERIENCES, which is a bit of an experimental/exploratory project. I'm also wrapping up writing on a script called MOTIONS, which I hope to begin production on at some point this summer!
Both of those projects will be posted on YouTube when they're finished/the time is right, and while I'm not in love with the way YouTube handles compression, I can confidently say that the video file I upload and share will continue to be the highest quality I can achieve.
If you’re curious, feel free to check out the new site—it’s live now. I’ll be keeping an eye on things and fixing issues as they come up, so if you run into anything, let me know on Twitter.
Nick out.