London Drawing

Context

London Drawing’s move into online classes created a large and rapidly growing body of recorded material.

A recording was not useful on its own. It belonged to a particular event, with a date, title, model or subject, description and place in the website. The challenge was to migrate and publish the video without losing those associations.

The original 2021 planning work therefore treated the project as four connected processes: historical download, Vimeo upload, the workflow for new Zoom recordings, and website integration.

The problem

The raw files themselves made the issue obvious. A Zoom filename carried little of the information somebody would later need to identify the class.

At scale, simply moving video files from one service to another would create a new archive that was technically complete but editorially useless.

The real task was to maintain the relationship between:

• the event/class;
• the recording;
• its descriptive metadata;
• the website page;
• Vimeo;
• the commercial viewing experience;
• the workflow for future recordings.

Understanding the system

The early migration work explored several ways of connecting Vimeo and the website, including Vimeo Showcase approaches and tighter per-event integration.

The longer-term solution became a structured WordPress/Pods environment. I designed the Pods schema, fields, relationships and templates and built the wider WordPress/Vimeo implementation used for the commercial on-demand library.

That gave the video catalogue an explicit content model rather than treating each recording as an isolated embed.

What I did

The work has included:

• analysing the historical migration and the operational effort involved;
• defining a process for associating downloaded recordings with their source events;
• exploring automation from Zoom into Vimeo;
• designing and implementing the structured WordPress/Pods model;
• creating the fields, relationships and templates used by the library;
• integrating the video experience with the wider London Drawing site;
• ongoing workflow support, analytics and troubleshooting;
• helping manage the later closure/final-sales phase of the legacy VOD system;
• investigating a successor workflow that could create an event/class once in WordPress and coordinate Eventbrite, Zoom and later Vimeo publication from the same canonical record.

What was built and what is being reconsidered

The historical commercial VOD library was a real operating system.

The current redevelopment question is different. The ambition is to reduce repeated data entry and make WordPress the place where an event/class is created once, with the other services coordinated around it. A mobile-first administrative interface and approval step around the post-event recording flow are part of that direction.

That successor work must not inherit “deployed” status from the older library merely because the client relationship is continuous.

Current position

London Drawing remains an ongoing client relationship.

The legacy structured video library is evidenced as operational/commercial. Current workflow automation and successor integration work remain at investigation/planning/prototype stages unless and until the project authority verifies a later implemented state.

What this work demonstrates

London Drawing shows the value of preserving relationships during migration.

It also shows a recurring pattern in my work: the first problem is often “move this material” or “connect these services”, but the durable solution depends on identifying the canonical object and the information that must travel with it.