ryan-wilkins.com

This one is personal. Our founder, Michael Wilkins, built the website for his own wedding: a private, invitation-only site that is the digital invitation, the RSVP, the menu and dietary form, the schedule and the couple's story in one place.

The idea was an invitation that feels like being flown somewhere. One continuous flight in a gold engraved style: above the clouds, down through them to a city, along its river at dusk, up a tree-lined drive to a château, where the couple's two dogs break the wax seal on an envelope and the guest's own invitation settles over it.

The difficulty is everything around the idea. A film that follows the scroll is exactly the kind of feature that breaks on a real guest list: older phones, patchy connections, people who have motion switched off, and relatives who just want the facts. And because it is a wedding, every guest's details had to stay private.

The film is not a video. It is 288 still frames in AVIF, about 57 KB each, painted onto a canvas, and the frame on screen depends on how far the guest has scrolled. The page uses the browser's own scrolling, with no smooth-scroll library and no wheel handler. A damped playhead and a cross-fade between frames keep it gliding however hard the guest scrolls. Every eighth frame loads first, so the whole flight can be scrubbed coarsely almost at once, and the rest fill in around the playhead: the first load asks for 58 of the 288 frames, about 3.7 MB, and frames left far behind are released from memory.

Underneath the film is a complete typeset invitation, and the film only takes over once it is running. With JavaScript off, on a data-saving connection or on 2G, the guest gets that document: the facts, a link to watch the film and the RSVP. Under reduced motion the film still follows the scroll, because it moves only when the guest does, but its automatic push-in at the end is switched off. That was a deliberate reversal. The first version gave those visitors a still page, and the couple, who both have the setting on, found they were missing half the site. Phones get the same flight as a 39-second film that plays itself and ends on a still identical to its last frame, so the invitation card can settle over it. A link that skips straight to the invitation is the first thing a keyboard reaches.

The pictures were generated with AI image and video models and then cut by hand. Seven stills were approved first as a storyboard, and each of seven clips was generated to start on one approved still and end on the next, so the chapters join on the same picture.

Each party of guests has one private link, and nothing but a holding card is public. The link signs the guest in afresh every time it is opened, so there is no password to forget. The data sits in a Postgres database with row-level security on all 17 tables, and the RSVP and menu forms are plain form posts that work without JavaScript.