By Ruslan Makaev, engineer
Two days in, the blueprints land. Scope, references, voice — what v1 of the studio site is, and what it deliberately is not.
Two days after the partnership closed, we sat down with the blueprints. The reference points were already on the table: Stink Films for the chrome, Iconoclast for the motion, the studio's own Instagram for the texture. Premium, editorial, dark, with one electric pink accent that earns its place by appearing rarely.
Scope for v1 stayed tight on purpose. A home reel. Roster pages for each discipline. A canonical /talent/<slug> for every name on the roster — the page each talent shares in DMs and rate cards. A work archive that grows as projects ship. A news ticker for milestones. A blog (this one) for longer-form thinking. Admin for Ilya to run the whole thing without ever asking an engineer.
What v1 is not, deliberately: a multi-locale site, a CMS with rich-text plugins, an analytics dashboard, a job board. Every one of those is a real conversation for later. The principle holds — defaults beat options, and if a feature can be removed without anyone noticing, it should be. v1 ships when the roster, the work, and the inbox all do their job. Everything else is Stage 3.