- Scope
- Website design & build
- Place
- Cairo, Egypt
- Sector
- Film production & creative studio
- Engagement
- Published project
- By
- Bigad Elsherif, founder of Appstruct
A studio whose pitch is its taste
Good Stuff is an independent creative studio and film production company in Cairo. It makes commercials, music videos and brand films, and works in photography, AI video, visual effects and post-production. Its own line for itself is “certified good taste”, filed and stamped by a Good Taste Department that does not exist.
That joke is the brief. A production company’s site is judged the way its films are: in a few seconds, on feel, by people who make things for a living. A tidy grid of thumbnails would have shown the work and said nothing about the people behind it. The site had to be a piece of the studio’s work in its own right, and still let a producer find a film, a client name and an email address without playing along.
Visit the live site
The idea
One object carries the whole site: the smiley.
The logo is a window
On the first screen the studio’s smiley is cut out of the page and the films play through it, between the two halves of the name. The mark is not placed on top of the work; the work is what the mark is made of. It reacts to the pointer, and the page says so in three words: move, click, hold.
A short film before the site
A first visit opens on a scroll-driven title sequence: a frowning face drawn in yellow on black, a list of bad ideas, then a page that floods yellow and turns the frown over. It is four scenes long, it is labelled as scenes, and it has a skip button in the corner for anyone who came for a phone number.
Every section is a thing you can handle
The films are a wall of televisions with channels. The services are piano keys mapped to the keyboard. The process is four official forms. The stills are books on a shelf. Each section borrows an object from a film set or an office, so the structure of a fairly ordinary studio site - work, services, process, gallery, contact - never reads as one.
What we did
Five decisions carry most of the work.
Scroll as the playhead
The homepage is long on purpose, and scrolling drives it the way a playhead drives a timeline: the hero opens into the reel, the reel spins, a timecode counts in the corner. Each sequence is pinned for a set distance, so it plays at the speed the visitor scrolls and stops when they stop.
Nine films, one screen
The film section is a single large television with eight small ones around it. Clicking a small set changes the channel; clicking the big one turns the sound on. The client, the title, the type and the year sit on the screen as a broadcast caption, so the information a producer needs is on the picture itself.
A library for the stills
Thirty-one stills are shelved as book spines across two shelves, each with a title. Pulling one opens it large with previous and next. A photographer’s grid would have been quicker to build and would have looked like every other one; the shelf gives each frame a name and a place.
A second room for the experiments
The AI work lives on its own page, Fix in Post, built as a wooden television with a tape deck: pick a tape, drag the faders, watch the picture respond. It is kept apart from the commissioned films, so what was shot and what was generated are never confused.
The same site on a phone, rebuilt for a thumb
On a phone the navigation moves to a bar at the bottom of the screen, the television wall becomes a single set, and the pointer tricks become taps. Nothing depends on hovering.
On a phone
Most links to a studio’s site arrive from a message or a feed, on a phone. The layout there is its own design: the same sections, the same jokes, sized and ordered for one hand.
Process, and the way out
Playful on top, plain underneath
A site this animated is usually invisible to anything that does not run its scripts. This one is built so that it is not.
- —Every page is served as finished HTML. The homepage’s text, film list, client list and contact details are in the document before any script runs.
- —Each of the nine films has its own page with the facts stated in sentences: what it is, who it was made for, the year, the running time, and a link to watch it.
- —The homepage ends with a short “at a glance” section in ordinary prose: what the studio is, where it is, what it makes, its selected films and its clients.
- —Structured data is generated at build time from the same data file the pages are built from, so the markup cannot drift from what is on screen.
- —The sitemap lists every film poster and every still. robots.txt welcomes search engines and AI assistants by name, and an llms.txt summarises the studio and links each film.
- —Motion is optional. The intro can be skipped, a skip link leads straight to the content, and the film pages work as plain documents.
Not an agency. Not quite an art club.
Where it stands
Live at goodstuffstdz.com, with nine films, thirty-one stills and the studio’s client list.
The site credits Appstruct as the partner that built it, in its services section and in its footer.
Every film can be reached, read and linked to without the animation running.
