Frames – Movie Studios & Filmmakers WordPress theme

Your filmography is a database, even if today it is a list of links

A production company piles up work over the years: shorts, commercials, music videos, a feature film. And people: directors, actresses, crew. When a client asks what you have done in a given genre or a given year, the answer tends to live in your memory or on a YouTube channel sorted by upload date.

A filmography starts working for you when each piece is a record with its genre, year and tags, and each person has their own entry. Until then, every client question gets answered from memory.

Frames, by HaruTheme, is built on that structure. It adds two custom content types to WordPress, Videos and Persons, and sets up home pages around them for studios, filmmakers, directors and actors.

Videos and Persons as their own content types

• Videos: each one carries a title, content, category, featured image, genres, tags, labels, years and its own video fields.
• Persons: title, content, category, featured image and their own fields.
• Video sources: YouTube, Vimeo, Twitch, Dailymotion, Facebook, Google Drive, embed code or your own files.
• Presentation: grid and slideshow listings, several templates for the single video, an Isotope gallery and playback in a popup.
• Thumbnails: of the video, slideshow or image type.

If you upload the files to your hosting, the storage and traffic come out of your server. The upload setting recommended for the theme is 128 MB, so a larger piece requires raising that limit or choosing an external source.

For catalogues that already live on YouTube or Vimeo, the separate Haru Filmmaker Importer plugin brings those videos in automatically and saves creating them one by one.

Home pages for studio, director and actor

It comes with more than seven home pages, each in a dark and a light version. Among them are home pages for a film studio, director, filmmaker, actor, actress and creative, plus a video blog. It is rounded off with more than three blog styles, more than three headers and more than four footers.

Headers, footers and mega menus are built with Elementor. It also includes a newsletter popup, a sticky header, inner pages for contact, about and services, and WooCommerce compatibility for selling products or services.

What a portfolio theme does not solve

Frames is for showing work. Among its features there are no subscriptions, no pay per view and no members area, so it is not the base for building a paid platform.

It is also not optimized for Gutenberg: its design relies on Elementor.

Requirements, plugins and getting it running

The recommended PHP limits include memory_limit of 256M and max_execution_time of 360.

The plugin list includes Elementor, Revolution Slider, Redux Framework, Contact Form 7, WooCommerce and the theme's own Haru Frames and Haru Filmmaker, among others. To begin:

1. Upload the theme under Appearance, Themes, and activate it.
2. Install the plugins from Appearance, Install Plugins.
3. Import a demo under Theme Options, Demo Importer.
4. If mobile styling breaks after importing, go to Elementor, Tools, General, click Regenerate Files & Data and sync the library.
5. If your site uses HTTPS and images are missing after importing, raise it with your host.
6. Create the real Persons and Videos first, with their genres and years, before touching the design.

Other film themes in the catalogue

If yours is a site about films and series rather than a studio portfolio, Vodi gives each film, series and video its own page with automatic structured data.

On the same ground of studios and filmmakers are Noxe, Filmic and Pixate.

Questions when building a film site with Frames

Does it import the videos from my channel automatically?

For YouTube and Vimeo, yes, with the separate Haru Filmmaker Importer plugin.

Do I need Elementor?

For headers, footers and mega menus, yes: they are built with it, and it is on the theme plugin list.

Can it charge people to watch films?

Among its features there are no subscriptions and no pay per view. WooCommerce is for selling products or services.