Reelizer — Roger Erik Tinch

Reelizer is my collection of movie art: posters, screenprints, illustrations, vinyl, books, toys, shirts. I select the work, design the site, and write the code. It relaunched in September 2025 after a ten-year gap.

The collection

The archive is 197 works, tied to 217 artists and directors, 126 films, 44 mediums, and 56 publishers and brands.

There are no ratings, no prices, no cart, no accounts. A piece is here because I chose it. Everything else on the page gets out of the way of that.

Browsing by connection

Brand goes to the publisher’s other releases, subject to the film, medium to everything else printed that way, artist to their body of work. The identifying fields are all links, so there is no faceted search UI to learn.

Header search covers the people who arrive knowing what they want: one Alpine component against a /search.json element-API endpoint, fired at two characters on a 300ms debounce.

Brand and subject link out; size and edition size are just the facts. This Alien screenprint came from Mondo, the shop I was freelancing for when Reelizer started.

Greg Ruth's page collects fourteen pieces. Most people in the archive have no portrait on file, so the hero generates a per-person gradient with a grain overlay instead of an empty box.

Alien from the other direction: a skateboard deck, a screenprint, a painting, an illustration, a t-shirt, a VHS sleeve. Covering every artform means one film pulls in six mediums.

The art leads

The references are Artsy and David Zwirner. No storefronts.
Neutrals carry a slight warm tint, closer to archival paper than to gray. No accent colors anywhere.
Titles recede. Work names sit at 20–24px in dimmed italic so the image stays the loudest thing on the page.
Konsole for display and body, IBM Plex Mono for metadata and labels, BN Boxer for the logotype.
Light mode is the default; dark mode is fully supported. These screenshots are dark.

How it’s built

Craft CMS 5 on PHP 8.3, with Tailwind v4, Alpine, and Vite on the front end. Five entry types (works, people, films, collections, companies), with relations doing the work a tag system would do badly.

Two plugins written for it:

tmdb-fetcher pulls film metadata from TMDB by IMDb ID, so adding a film is one field instead of ten.
affiliate handles /go/{slug} redirects and logs the clicks.

Images run through Imager X: AVIF and WebP with fallbacks, blurhash placeholders for blur-up loading, transforms generated on save and served from S3 behind CloudFront. Pages are statically cached with Blitz and purged through Cloudflare, with regeneration handed to dedicated queue workers.

Fifteen years

Reelizer started in early 2011, while I was freelancing for Mondo. That work sent me combing Etsy, Behance, and Tumblr for what felt like a new generation of movie art, and I put up an ExpressionEngine site in a week to catalog it. A link from Daring Fireball took the server down that February.

By 2015 I’d moved to Austin to work at Alamo Drafthouse, and ExpressionEngine was going obsolete. The site went on hiatus, briefly as a Tumblr, and stayed there for ten years. I started rebuilding on Craft in 2021, reworked the structure and the design more than once, and relaunched in September 2025.

The about page tells the full history in the site's own voice. I built the collage from pieces in the archive.

New works go in as I find them.