HV Vault

I've been part of Fine Arts since sixth grade — first as a student performer, later as a college coach. Human Video has always had a judges' score: a panel decides the final round every year, the equivalent of a critics score. What it never had was a community score. Everyone in the community carries their own ranked list of the greatest human videos of all time, and debating those lists is half the fun — but there was no way to capture it, settle it, or share it.

There also was no single place to watch the best of all time. No definitive list existed — not even on the Fine Arts website — so anyone curious about Human Video, or about Fine Arts itself, had no easy way in.

HV Vault is my own self-started project: I found the gap inside a community I belong to, defined the product, and designed and built it myself. I also coached a Fine Arts team at Nationals this year, which put me on the ground for the launch.

Product Definition

• Wrote a product requirements document (working in Claude), defining the core mechanic: head-to-head 1-vs-1 comparisons that refine into a community leaderboard and a permanent archive of top performances
• Modeled the concept on the critics-vs-audience split: judges' results already exist; HV Vault adds the missing audience score

Build

• Built hvvault.com myself in Webflow — the public site, plus a resource library for first-time Human Video coaches
• Built the ranking engine (rankthevault.com) in Lovable from the PRD — the 1-vs-1 comparisons, leaderboard, and archive
• Built an admin tool for myself to track analytics — what was performing, what wasn't — and refine features from real usage
• Iterated directly on user feedback from the community after launch

Launch — Nationals, St. Louis (August 2026)

• Built the platform in July 2026 and hard-launched it in person at the AG National Fine Arts Festival
• Printed business cards with a QR code; students I coached each carried 20–30 cards and distributed them across the convention
• On the final day, during the final round of Human Video callbacks, cards were placed on the seats so the audience could vote on the large-group finalists in the moment