In Karl Lemieux’s film Maudite Poutine, a young man—accused of stealing drugs from the mob—encounters his estranged brother while hiding in a rural Québec town; the bizarrely violent and hostile environment of this small town provides the ambiance for the film. And it’s this ambiance that Montréal-based ad agency Écorce conveys in the site for Maudite Poutine, which features interactive elements that encourage visitors to explore the film’s setting. With help from Montréal-based development firm KFFEIN, Écorce’s site features a subtle navigation system that leads visitors through three sections, introducing each with a poetic interaction. With minimal explanations, the site puts experience ahead of facts, and eschews a clear narrative to let visitors make their own conclusions on the film.

During the making of this site with its more than 350 MB of images, sounds and videos, Écorce realized that loading times would pose a significant hurdle to overcome. With the help of KFFEIN, Écorce chose to use a preloader for all global assets, as well as assets specific to the visitor’s current section; while the visitor navigates one section, the site begins to load assets of the next section. For the framework, Écorce and KFFEIN used a customized version of VueJS that compiles 500 files and 10,000 lines of code into five files on the site’s front end. The site is prerendered and cached on the fly with NodeJS.