Tapes & Trees
A home-movie business in Vienna, Virginia: the storefront, a private website for each family’s tapes, and the pipeline behind it.
- The job
- Turn a box of old tapes into something a family will watch, and make booking it simple.
- For
- Tapes & Trees, a family business in Vienna, Virginia
- Relationship
- Paul’s family runs it.
- Built with
- Next.js 15, Tailwind, Cloudflare Pages, Functions and Durable Objects, Resend, Python, ffmpeg, Claude
The storefront.
The home page, shown at the top of this page, leads with the price, then two ways in: book a drop-off time or ask for a pickup. Behind it are gift certificates, a pay page, an owner dashboard and email alerts for every booking.
Family Movie Sites.
Each family’s tapes come back as a private website. It is searchable by name, place, occasion and year, opens on the highlights, and splits every tape into titled, dated scenes. A family tree links each person to the scenes they appear in. A site opens only with its own private link and a family code. The sample shown here is built from public-domain home movies.
The capture station and pipeline.
A capture station records each tape. Speech is transcribed on our own computers, Claude titles the scenes from still frames and the transcript, and the family’s site is built and published. Raw captures and working files are deleted 30 days after delivery, and a flash-drive-only order is never published.
The Proof Ledger.
Family history research, sold alongside the movies. An ancestor goes on the tree only when a primary record proves the link, and the original record is read, not just its typed index. The sample ledger traces Paul’s own family.
