Documentr

Making videos on your phone or getting users to post content may not be news. But making branded videos on your phone using content from your social networks is another, bigger, story. That's the idea LA-agency Team One came to us with. To increase the challenge, the branded content had to be powered by a CMS, and the UI had to be skinnable in order to account for different clients and groups.

That’s how Documntr was born, the first mobile application that lets you composite videos on your phone using content from your social network, created with your camera, and pulled from CMS powered brand content.

What may sound simple at first actually required several stages of development. Step one was to do thorough technical research. Team One had critical requirements that needed prototyping.

First, no video composition off a remote server. For the first time, content would be created, saved, and composited on the local device.

Second, their model for the application was to build it once, then skin it and sell it to different clients. This meant not only did the UI have to be easily (economically) replaceable, but the CMS that powers the brand content in-app also had to be reusable across multiple clients.

The solution took some time but it was worth it. Using an OpenGL-based video-composition approach gave us the flexibility and creativity we needed. And we built the UI components in a way that would allow for the graphic set to be easily replaced and modified with a couple lines of code. Then finally, we wrote a script that duplicates the CMS so we can be up and running for a new client simply by changing URLs.