Cinematica Weddings

The brief

Alex shoots documentary weddings on film, digital, and Super 8 across San Diego, Europe, and beyond. His work is dark, filmic, and editorial — motion-blurred veils, candlelit interiors, brides on green headlands. His old site was a bare Web.com builder template with no real portfolio and no pricing. It didn't come close to the work.

He wanted something that read like his photography: cinematic, restrained, and built to be found.

What I built

A full ground-up rebuild on Astro with a warm, light editorial design system — a masthead serif, self-hosted display and script faces, textured section bands, and slow reveals on scroll. Every frame from his galleries was resized, curated, and captioned by hand.

The pages:

• Home with a trimmed video hero and a press marquee (Vogue, Junebug, Vanity Fair, Tatler)
• Portfolio organized into chapters with an asymmetric masonry layout
• About, Investment (three tiers), Contact, and an unlisted pricing sheet
• A /journal blog built from scratch — four full features, each with its own gallery

Under the hood:

• Inquiry pipeline: the contact form posts to his F-Stop CRM and sends a Resend email backup, so a lead never gets dropped
• LocalBusiness and BlogPosting structured data, sitemap, generated OG image
• Custom domain on Vercel with 301s for the old URLs

The result

The site finally matches the work. Inquiries land in Alex's CRM the moment someone hits submit, the journal gives him a real content engine for SEO, and every page loads fast and reads like an editorial spread rather than a template.