Shortbuzz
One of the top short film sites on the web (circa 2002).
Shortbuzz was one of the first showcases for short film on the web, with more than 250 films from up-and-coming filmmakers. It was covered by WIRED, Rolling Stone, Premiere, The New York Times, ABC News, and others. In June 2000, it was acquired by iCAST, an entertainment portal created by CMGI.
As CTO and senior producer, I ran day-to-day operations for over a year and oversaw the interface, content, and technology. I also encoded more than 2,000 minutes of video for RealPlayer and Windows Media.
Buzz
To automate our short film publishing workflow, I built Buzz, a content management system that let anyone on the team publish films and daily features without technical knowledge. It ran on FileMaker Pro and AppleScript, with a custom interface on top and about 10,000 to 15,000 lines of code.
The first screen people saw when they logged in to Buzz.
Buzz / Opening screen
The default view in the Films module. Tabs for each genre showed every film in that category, and clicking a thumbnail opened a film.
Films module / List view
Basic stats for a film, like its director, rating, length, and status. Tabs on the left led to contact info, cast and crew, viewer comments, and more.
Films module / Summary page
A search tool for finding a particular film, modeled on the Find File pane in Apple’s Sherlock.
Films module / Search window
Every acquisitions update in one place, with more detail available on each film.
Acquisition module / Activity log
Everything about encoding a film into a streaming format, a step every film went through before it could be published.
Encoding module / Film detail
Pick a film, choose its HTML page, RealPlayer files, and related category pages, and publish them all to the staging server.
Publishing module / Publish a film
Shortbuzz featured a new film every day. This screen set the schedule for the next ten days, with labels that showed the actual dates being programmed.
Publishing module / Set schedule
Choose the films for the Editor’s Choice page, then publish the picks or save them for later.
Publishing module / Editor’s Choice
Build a custom report about the film library, choosing its layout, content, and sort order.
Reports module / Make a report
Pick a saved report from the list and it was recreated instantly.
Reports module / Saved reports
How Buzz was put together. A custom interface sat on top of FileMaker Pro, and AppleScript drove BBEdit, Fetch, and the Finder to publish the site.