Amazon MGM Studios
Website
Two Amazon Studio Sites:One Built From the Ground Upand One Built From Within
Pretty Big Monster partnered with Amazon MGM Studios on two corporate websites that started in very different places.
For Bray Studios, the heritage film studio on the River Thames, we fielded the entire project. For Amazon MGM Studios Crew Training, we designed the experience to work inside Amazon's existing Brightspot CMS and worked alongside Brightspot's internal team to launch it.
One was a blank slate. The other came with a platform, a team, and rules already in place. Both had to meet Amazon's standard.
Bray Studios, Every Layer
Bray has been home to productions from The Rocky Horror Picture Show and Alien to The Rings of Power. The site needed to pitch a working studio to today's productions while respecting nearly a century of filmmaking history.
We took it from first concept to live site, and we still run it today.
Our scope covered:
- Design and UX
- Front-end development
- AWS infrastructure setup
- Video production, including the homepage masthead
- Content migration from the previous site
- Ongoing maintenance and support
The Nuts and Bolts
A studio website for Amazon is still an Amazon property. The parts nobody sees matter as much as the parts everyone does.
We set up and manage the AWS environment behind braystudios.com, so the site is fast, secure, and easy to update. Working with Amazon's own dev ops team to ensure all guidelines & requires were successfully met.
Behind the scenes:
- Infrastructure configured to Amazon's security requirements
- Separate staging and production environments for reviewed releases
- Fast delivery of heavy video and image content worldwide
- Ongoing maintenance that keeps the site current as the studio evolves
Migrating the content also meant rethinking it. We restructured facility details, studio history, and the "Made at Bray" production archive so they fit the new site's structure and not the old one's.
Amazon Ascend, Designed Within the System
Amazon MGM Studios Crew Training is AMS's workforce development program. It connects people with traineeships, step-up roles, and training courses on real productions across the UK, US, Canada, and Australia.
This time we didn't bring our own stack. The site runs on Brightspot, Amazon's existing CMS. Our job was to design an experience that felt purpose-built while working within the platform's components, templates, and publishing workflow.
The approach:
- Learn the platform first: what its modules can do and where the limits are
- Design around the real content: programs, regional initiatives, impact numbers, partner stories
- Deliver designs the Brightspot team could build and Amazon's editors could maintain
- Stay involved through build, QA, and launch
Collaboration Is Part of the Job
Corporate web projects don't happen in isolation. There are platform owners, brand teams, legal reviews, and internal engineers with their own roadmaps. We worked inside that structure instead of around it.
The result is a site Amazon's own team can run. They publish news, partner updates, and impact stories without needing an agency for every change.
Built From Scratch. Built From Within.
The two projects show both sides of how we approach corporate web:
- Full ownership when a client needs one partner for every layer
- Close collaboration when the platform and team are already in place
The two sites also link to each other. Bray's crew training page points to the Crew Training program, and the program points back to Bray. They're two parts of the same studio story, and we helped build both.