Assembly Films & RecRoom NYC

The challenge: a website that moves like a reel

A production company sells with motion. The Assembly designs asked for a roster where every director tile comes alive on hover, director pages that open on a reel of spots with a preview of each one, and a living bio for each director. All of it had to stay easy for the Assembly team to update as directors and spots changed. Then, a year later, the brief came back with a twist. RecRoom wanted its own site on the same system, built around its work instead of directors.

"...the objective here is to update our website To match what you guys did with assembly, but also to function on its own"
— Bryan Moak, Senior Editor/Creative Director, RecRoom NYC

How we built the Assembly Films site in Webflow

We built the Assembly site in Webflow from the team's designs, with the directors and their spots in the CMS, so the Assembly team could add a director or swap a spot from the CMS. The hover previews, the reel pages and the living bio were built as interactions on top of that structure. Assembly's team reviewed every page on a staging link and left comments right on the design, and we recorded short videos to train their editors on the CMS before launch. The roster went live with nine directors. When the site launched, Assembly kept us on a maintenance plan for the changes that came next, like tuning how long the hover videos play.

• 9 directors on the Assembly roster at launch
• 4 page types, built from the Assembly team's designs

How we launched RecRoom NYC on the same design system

When Bryan Moak called about RecRoom, he and Seb Etienne had already started a mock site on our Assembly template. The job was to make it RecRoom's own. We swapped directors for work categories, turned each reel page into six spots, made spot names read the same on phones and desktops, and added a Meet the Team page with black and white portraits and short bios. We also kept the preview videos light so the pages stay quick. RecRoom's new site was live about six weeks after Bryan signed.

• About 6 weeks from signed scope of work to RecRoom's live site
• 2 sites on one Webflow design system

"...there's nothing too crazy that needs to be done in terms of reinventing what we've already done with you guys."
— Bryan Moak, Senior Editor/Creative Director, RecRoom NYC

What happened after launch

A few months after RecRoom went live, Bryan told us how it was going. The site was working, the studio had booked jobs that summer, and the feedback had been good. Assembly has since become part of Honor Society, but RecRoom still runs on the site we built, with new work categories added as the studio grows, including its Digital Content Studio.

"It's great. It's working. Well, we're you know We're uh, we booked some jobs this summer."
— Bryan Moak, Senior Editor/Creative Director, RecRoom NYC

"...I don't think we're going to change our website for a while because we just did and we're really happy with it..."
— Bryan Moak, Senior Editor/Creative Director, RecRoom NYC

Credits

Client: MacGuffin Films group. Assembly Films: Joy Saylor (Head of Production), Clea Colangelo, Sebastien Etienne. RecRoom NYC: Bryan Moak (Senior Editor/Creative Director), Sebastien Etienne

Page designs (Assembly Films): the Assembly Films team

Webflow development, CMS and interactions: the Fri3nds team. Project management by Camila Ardila (RecRoom)

Services: Webflow development, CMS build, interactions, staging QA, CMS training, website maintenance, design system reuse