October 1, 2024
O. Wolfson
The 60 Second Film Festival is an international showcase of one-minute films from independent creators around the world. As both Festival Director and Developer, I designed and built the site to reflect the values of the festival: brevity, creativity, and accessibility.
The festival began as a response to the question: "What happens when you give talented filmmakers just 60 seconds to tell a story?" The results, as we’ve discovered, are consistently surprising, often hilarious, and always engaging.
From a technical perspective, the platform is more than a simple brochure site—it’s a fast, dynamic system to manage content, event data, submissions, and media-rich film showcases.
appDir support) for optimal rendering performance, routing, and static generation@cloudinary/react) to handle optimized, responsive film stills and poster imagesgray-matter for managing long-form content like the festival's story, history, and philosophyreact-hook-form and zod for real-time validation and async upload supportnext-sitemap on postbuildjson"scripts": {
"dev": "next dev",
"build": "next build",
"postbuild": "next-sitemap"
}
The project is built with performance and portability in mind. Everything deploys serverlessly. Most content is static, but anything dynamic (like participation forms) uses Supabase or Airtable via API clients. Media is lazily loaded through Cloudinary CDN.
Dev tools include:
rehype-slug for syntax and anchors in MDX pagesSince its debut in 2017, the 60 Second Film Festival has:
The site supports both casual browsers and serious submitters, while remaining lightweight and scalable.
This festival celebrates brevity as a storytelling superpower, and the web platform follows the same philosophy:
"Constraints make us more creative."
From a technical standpoint, I’ve kept the system lean, modular, and creator-focused—just like the films themselves.
"When you ask talented filmmakers to create films lasting 60 seconds or less, the results are often hilarious. Sometimes they're touching or scary, but always entertaining." — Oliver Wolfson, Festival Director
The 60 Second Film Festival isn’t just about making short films—it’s about building an ecosystem where art, tech, and community converge. As the web developer, I’ve ensured that the platform can grow with the vision, while remaining performant and expressive.
This is cinema at its most condensed—and coding at its most intentional.