Fugue State Cinema — A Full Streaming Platform Built to Run Itself
A fully custom documentary streaming platform for filmmaker Will Fraser — a 24-film catalogue, Stripe-powered rentals, purchases and gifting, and a free monthly film list, all editable by Will himself with no need to call us.
Results
The brief
Will Fraser makes beautiful, niche documentary films about the pipe organ, Bach and choral music — the kind of subject matter that Netflix will never touch and generic streaming templates can’t do justice to. He needed somewhere his films could live properly: rent it, buy it, gift it, or catch the free film of the month. And critically, he needed to run the whole thing himself once we walked away — no calling us every time he wants to add a new title.
What we built
Not a WordPress plugin bolted onto a video player. A proper platform:
- A 24-film catalogue with posters, synopses, credits and a “Coming Soon” shelf, pulling thumbnails from Vimeo with sensible fallbacks so nothing ever looks broken
- Four curated collections — The Organ Series, Choral & Sacred, The Bach Edition and General Documentaries — that Will can create, reorder and switch on or off himself
- A proper checkout, built on Stripe, handling 48-hour rentals, lifetime purchases, gifting, and Will’s own promo code system (including 100%-off codes that skip Stripe entirely)
- RCO Cinema, a free monthly film with a GDPR-compliant double opt-in, so Will builds an engaged mailing list one great film at a time
- 11 branded email templates covering every step — rental confirmation, gift received, watch link retrieval, the lot — all sending from his own domain, all personalised, none of them looking like a receipt from a robot
The bit that matters most
Everything above is editable by Will, from Sanity Studio, without touching a line of code. New film, new collection, new promo code, new RCO title each month — done in minutes, not in an email to us.
That’s the actual point of a platform like this. A pretty site that only we can update isn’t a tool, it’s a dependency. This one hands the keys back.
Under the bonnet
Streaming platforms are unforgiving — payment webhooks, video privacy, cookie consent, GDPR opt-ins all have to work first time, every time. A handful of the fixes that never make it into a showreel but absolutely make the difference:
- Payments that fail silently are worse than no payments at all — we caught and fixed a redirect issue that was quietly turning every checkout, webhook and form submission into a broken request before it ever reached Stripe
- Email and watch links that pointed at a server address instead of the real domain — fixed before a single customer saw it
- An invisible security check on checkout, so nothing gets in the way of someone trying to give Will their money
None of this shows up in a screenshot. All of it is why the site simply works.
The result
A platform built to disappear into the background so the films can do the talking — and one Will can grow himself, month after month, without waiting on us to do it for him.
Four sites now, if you’re counting — this one included. Fugue State Cinema is the latest chapter in a client relationship, not a one-off build.
Fancy a platform of your own, not just another template? Get in touch and let’s talk about what you actually need it to do.
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Nick has created three fabulous websites for me and his vision allows me to keep up with and often overtake my competitors. He's very easy to work with and always finds a great solution.
— Will Fraser, Founder, Fugue State Films
No sales pitch. No pressure. Just an honest conversation about where your business is and where you want to go.