Working Stiff Films

Drupal

For Working Stiff Films, I built a highly immersive, animated Flash-driven website powered by a custom headless Drupal backend—years before decoupled architectures became mainstream. This project showcased an innovative approach where Drupal handled all structured content, media relationships, and editorial workflows, while a fully animated Flash interface consumed the data and rendered it as a cinematic, interactive experience.

A Decoupled System Ahead of Its Time

  • Drupal served as the content API, storing directors, film spots, press items, media metadata, and video assets.
  • The Flash application dynamically requested and rendered content, creating seamless transitions, motion-driven layouts, and a highly visual showcase of work.
  • Provided a flexible editorial system where the production company could update projects, add new commercial spots, and reorganize content—without touching Flash.

Technical Highlights

  • Fully custom Drupal content model for film spots, directors, categories, and assets
  • Custom XML/JSON endpoints consumed directly by Flash
  • Animated video galleries and transitions built in ActionScript
  • Deep-linking and navigational state synced between Drupal data and Flash interactions
  • Optimized media delivery for video-heavy content typical of film production studios

Impact

This build delivered a visually immersive portfolio experience that stood apart from typical agency sites at the time. Today, it serves as an early example of the decoupled experiences that are now widely adopted using modern tools (React, Vue, Next.js)—but executed years earlier with Drupal + Flash.