Sundance TV

Case Study

Turning Personal Expression Into a Product

Sundance TV’s Be Original transformed the idea of personal expression into an interactive storytelling product where viewers could combine their own media, words, and ideas into stories they could publish and share.

Designed as a responsive mobile, tablet, and desktop experience supporting Sundance TV programming, the site allowed people to authenticate through a social account or continue as a guest, select photos and video, assemble that content into a personal story, add captions and dialogue, publish the finished work into a public catalog, and share it with others through social channels.

I served as a Senior Interactive Developer and the primary frontend developer on the project, developing all but one page of the experience. My responsibility extended beyond implementation. I was involved during planning, participated in stakeholder conversations throughout the engagement, and helped the team determine how the creative concept could become a functioning digital product.

Planning the Experience Before Building It

The challenge was not simply designing a collection of pages. We had to determine how users would actually create, manipulate, save, publish, and share their own stories.

I worked closely with design and creative throughout that process. They brought concepts to the table, I brought ideas and technical considerations of my own, and together we defined how the experience should behave. Part of my role was helping guide those conversations around what was technically achievable while finding ways to preserve and strengthen the creative intent.

That collaboration extended across the UI, interaction behavior, media presentation, social functionality, and audio experience. Instead of development beginning only after those decisions had been made, I was helping shape them while the product itself was still being defined.

Building the Story Editor From Scratch

At the center of the experience was a custom editor that turned a promotional website into a tool people could actually use to create something of their own.

I architected and developed the frontend story editor from scratch. Users could bring media into the experience, organize that content into frames, add captions or dialogue, work through the composition of their story, and ultimately prepare it for publishing.

Building the editor required thinking beyond individual interface states. The experience needed to keep track of user choices and content while making a relatively complex creation process feel understandable. The interface had to support experimentation without losing sight of the final goal: helping someone turn a collection of media and ideas into a coherent personal story.

I also developed the broader UI and integrations surrounding that workflow, including the audio player experience and social functionality. Taken together, those systems made the project feel less like a traditional campaign microsite and more like a focused content-creation product.

Defining Interaction Through Collaboration

One of the project’s more distinctive interactions presented story cards along a nonlinear, clothesline-like path. The team wanted something less rigid than a traditional horizontal carousel, with movement and momentum helping the content feel more physical and expressive.

This was the one primary page I did not personally develop, but I was involved in defining how the interaction should work. Design, creative, development, and I worked together on the concept and behavior, including how cards would move along the path and respond as users navigated through the content.

That distinction is representative of how my role was evolving. My contribution was increasingly not limited to the code I personally wrote. I was helping determine interaction behavior and guiding technical decisions across the experience, even when another developer ultimately implemented a specific piece.

Connecting Frontend, Backend & Social

A creation tool only worked if the systems behind it could reliably move user content through authentication, editing, saving, publishing, cataloging, and sharing.

I did not develop the backend, but I worked directly with the backend developer to define the payload structures the frontend needed. That collaboration helped establish a clean contract between the creation experience I was building and the services responsible for storing and returning the data behind it.

I also implemented the frontend social integrations that connected users and their content to the broader experience. The result was a workflow that moved from personal media selection and story creation through publishing and social sharing rather than treating those functions as disconnected features.

From Development Through Launch

I remained involved through integration, QA, browser and device testing, deployment, and launch support. Because I had developed nearly the entire frontend, resolving issues often required understanding how a change in one part of the experience could affect the editor, data integration, responsive behavior, media, or social functionality elsewhere.

That end-to-end involvement also gave me continuity from the earliest planning conversations through the moment the experience reached its audience. The same technical considerations I had raised during planning could be validated against the finished product rather than handed from one discipline to another and forgotten.

From Audience to Participants

Instead of asking viewers simply to consume promotional content, Be Original gave them a tool for contributing their own stories to the experience.

Hundreds of fan stories were created through the site, turning individual photos, video, and writing into a growing catalog of audience-created work. Viewers could move from audience members to participants, creating something personal within the Sundance TV experience and then publishing and sharing it with others.

Shaping Experiences, Not Just Implementing Them

This project represents an important point in my progression from hands-on development toward broader digital delivery and strategy leadership. I was still deeply involved in implementation and personally built nearly the entire frontend, but I was already working further upstream and across disciplines.

I helped plan the product before development, contributed ideas alongside design and creative, guided technical feasibility and interaction decisions, built the core creation experience, coordinated frontend and backend requirements, implemented social and media integrations, participated directly with stakeholders, and remained involved through QA and launch.

That experience helped reinforce a principle that would become increasingly important throughout my career: strong development leadership starts before the code. It requires understanding the objective, contributing to how the experience should work, helping other disciplines understand the opportunities and constraints of technology, and remaining accountable until the product is ready for its audience.

It also reinforced another philosophy I continue to bring to the teams I lead today: difficult problems are usually solved incrementally, and the breakthroughs along the way are worth recognizing. Small victories matter, both to the quality of the work and to the people creating it. That remains one of my core philosophies.