Built the web presence for a studio whose videos are built to win deals.

About

Apollo makes animated and live-action video for B2B teams, the kind that has to survive a procurement committee rather than a scroll. They are also Native's sister agency, which is the shortest way to say that we are held to a higher standard here, not a lower one.

The challenge

A video studio's website has a narrow job. Nobody reads it first. They watch something, decide within a few seconds whether these people are good, and only then look for a reason to believe it. The site has to hold that standard and then get out of the way.

Which makes weight the whole problem. A site that leans on a heavy framework spends its loading budget on itself, and the work it exists to show up arrives late on the one connection that matters, in an office, on a laptop, halfway through a meeting.

The solution

Astro, static, and disciplined about what ships. The homepage sends no JavaScript bundles at all: what little behaviour it needs is inline, and everything else is HTML and CSS that arrives ready to paint. That is not an optimisation pass done at the end. It is the consequence of picking a static-first stack on day one and not reaching for a framework the site did not need.

It was built in Ship Studio, the desktop app Native makes and gives away. That is worth saying plainly rather than as a boast: the tool is not a side project we keep at arm's length from client work. It is where the client work happens.

The results

The site is live at apollostudio.com, static, on Vercel, and it loads the way a portfolio for a craft business ought to: the work first, and nothing in front of it.