How to lay out a video portfolio page
with a hero, a featured pair and a grid.

Two conditions have to be met for a film to show up, and they are independent of each other. Its visibility has to be Public, which is an access decision. Its layout tag has to be something other than Hidden, which is a page decision. Get one and not the other and a visitor sees the empty state, with no error to tell you why.

That separation is worth understanding rather than working around. Access and layout are different questions. A film can be Public and Hidden at once, which is what you want for a piece you send by link but do not want opening your reel. It can also be Private and tagged Hero, which shows nothing to anybody, and is usually a mistake.

Start from the pitch, not the archive. If the work you want more of is car interiors at night, the Hero is your best night interior, whatever year it is from. The rest of the page then reads as evidence for that claim rather than as a diary. A page that opens with last month’s corporate piece because it was last month is arguing, without meaning to, that the corporate piece is the best you have.

The first screen is the only one you are guaranteed. A Hero runs the full width of the content column, so on most screens it fills the first view alongside your name and your line of text. That is the right amount of work above the fold: one film, unarguable. The second row, your Featured pair, is where a visitor who kept scrolling decides whether the first frame was luck. Put the two pieces there that prove it was not.

Below that, the Standard grid is doing a different job. Three across reads as a body of work rather than as a set of statements, and that is what you want it to read as: range, volume, the fact that you have done this often. Sequence still matters inside it. The first three cards of the grid are seen far more than the last three, so keep the strongest supporting work at the top of the grid rather than saving it for the end.

One more thing the order does. If you have a text block or a contact button between rows, place it after the Featured pair rather than at the very bottom. A visitor who has just watched three convincing things is the one most likely to press it, and a page that makes them scroll past everything else to find it is spending that intent on a scrollbar.

A practical rule: once a year, walk the page and ask of every film whether you would be happy to be judged on it alone. Anything that fails goes to Hidden the same day. The films that made you money three years ago are the ones this test catches, because loyalty to a job is not the same as loyalty to the work.

Storage is the only thing metered here, so hiding a film costs nothing extra in bandwidth or views. There is no per-view charge and no bandwidth cap on any plan, which means the only reason to delete a film is that you want the gigabytes back.

One account-level switch, Autoplay hero (muted), turns the Hero into a moving frame. It is off by default and it is silent by design: there is no sound, ever, on the portfolio page. The behaviour is narrower than the name suggests, and the details matter for layout. A Hero plays only while it is actually on screen, so a Hero placed far down the page does nothing until a visitor reaches it. If you have more than one Hero, only the one most in view plays. Hovering any other card pauses it and moving away releases it.

That is an argument for a single Hero at the top, which is the same conclusion the layout already pointed at. It is also an argument for choosing the opening seconds of that film deliberately, because those seconds are now your page.

Every other card sits on its poster frame until a visitor hovers it, at which point it plays a silent preview. That makes the posters the actual layout of your page. A grid of three cards is three still frames next to each other, and if two of them are dark and one is a white title card, the row reads as broken regardless of how good the films are. Pick the frames as a set, not one at a time. Setting a thumbnail from the frame you want covers how to pull those stills from the film itself.

The page lives at uncompressed.io/yourname and at yourname.uncompressed.io, both of which exist from the moment you pick a username. There is no publish step and no visitor account. What there is not, and it is worth saying plainly, is a custom domain: if the address itself has to be yours, run a site on your own domain and embed these films into it instead.