Villon Films
https://wesort.co.uk/about/villon-films
Villon Films is a company which licenses and distributes the work of Peter Davis and other documentarians.
With 400+ films and 5000+ photographs, the collection spans over 100 years and many, many topics across governments, cultures and history. The website needed to enable the authors to contextualise the individual items within it through details, groupings and storytelling.
Alex Wilson approached me for this project following our successful collaboration with the Satellite Dreaming site. At this point, the Villon archive had a nominal Wordpress site, but this barely scratched the surface of what lay within it and was holding them back.
The website exists to expose the collection to a broad audience in entertainment, education, museums and publishing by licensing the work. It sits in parallel to growing presences on YouTube and Vimeo.
Building the site involved configuring and organising individual items in the archive so that visitors could easily explore it. Crucially, it provides the archivists with a content authoring experience that enables them to tell the stories and connections beyond the media.
Once again, we chose to use Statamic as the CMS as it enables us to finely tune the authoring experience (eg: create and configure fields as required) and to create a bespoke front-end design for the site.
While building, populating and designing the site, we were grateful to:
- Aryeh Raber for their Uuid Statamic add-on which allowed us to set a unique code for each item in the archive
- Rias Van der Veken for their Data Import add-on which sped things up with bulk uploads
- Jonas Siewertsen for help integrating with Algolia search
- Sophie Gibson for graphic design