Our home-page film now speaks four languages

A product that turns websites into films should be able to make its own home-page film without an editor. If it cannot, the fix belongs in the product, not on a timeline. So we hold ourselves to one rule: the home-page film is rendered from a storyboard, through the same pipeline, and any flaw we see is repaired in the code before we render again.

That makes it the most watched test we have. Four languages multiply every detail by four, and a home page holds everything that is hard to film: a tall headline, a form, a gallery of cards, a closing call to action. Version 6 looked fine in thumbnails. Frame by frame, it still had things to teach us.

Version 7 was the first set rendered with that week's camera work, typing pace, cutting style and caption placement. We judged it on frames, not on scores:

• the German headline was whole, where version 6 had cut it to Erstellt mit Pa;
• the French film had no cropped frames, where it had three;
• the address field showed pagetovid.com being typed, where it had shown an empty box;
• the Spanish film went from 40.9 to 35.3 seconds against a 35-second target, after its narration went from 61 words to 53.

That last line holds the whole lesson about length: the words are the length, so a film that runs long needs fewer words, not a faster voice.

Our home page is almost black, and filming it showed us a setting tuned for light sites. Behind every card, the renderer darkens the page so white type reads over anything. On a page that is already dark, that turned our own headline and buttons into a shadow. The darkening is now measured from the page's own brightness, so a dark page keeps about 85% of its light instead of 44%, and light pages look exactly as before.

Three more improvements came from the same frames:

• a page's large headline is never parked behind the caption any more;
• a form is framed together with the headline above it whenever both fit;
• each screen recording now starts once the camera has settled on its subject, so a clip never opens on the page as it looked a moment earlier.

For version 9 all four storyboards took the same nine-scene shape: a short opening beat with a person, the address typed and Continue pressed, the five steps, the gallery and its middle card, the three formats, a short closing beat, and a close on the headline with its form.

We chose the gallery's middle card on purpose. At full zoom the camera cannot centre the outer columns of a three-column grid, because its view stays inside the page, and that limit is now something the page inspection reports. Adding scenes meant trimming words, since each scene adds a moment of transition. The Spanish and German narrations were cut to fit the measured pace of their slower voices, and their typing shot moved to the closing card, where the form had room above the caption.

All four versions went live on 22 September, each checked frame by frame before it replaced the old one:

• English: 98 out of 100, 39.4 seconds;
• French: 97, 36.0 seconds;
• Spanish: 96, 35.0 seconds;
• German: 98, 35.5 seconds.

Their closing cards now use the page's own words in each language, not a bare button verb. What matters more than the scores is where the fixes went. Every repair version 9 needed lives in the product, so every film made from now on gets it too. You can make the same kind of film of your own site on the new film page.