California VFX Workers for Inclusion

Generate a personalized letter to your state representatives in support of VFX incentives in California.

How it works:

  1. Enter your information in the form.
  2. Click the button to generate your letters.
  3. We'll find your California legislators using Google's Civic Information API.
  4. Copy the letter and the legislator's email address into your email client.
Note: This site uses the Google Civic Information API to identify your representatives based on your address. Your data is never stored.
Please enter your full name
Please enter a valid email address
Please enter your street address
Please enter your city
Please enter a valid 5-digit California ZIP code
Finding your legislators...

Your Personalized Advocacy Letters

State Senator
Assembly Member

Below is your personalized letter to your State Senator --

senator.email@senate.ca.gov

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How I Built the VFX Inclusion Letter Website

I wanted to create a simple but effective tool to help California VFX workers advocate for including visual effects in the state's film industry tax incentives. Here's how I built it:

I needed a straightforward way for VFX professionals to contact their legislators. The challenge was creating something that would require minimal effort from users while still generating personalized, professional-looking letters.

First, I designed a simple form to collect basic information - name, email, occupation, company and address. The address part was crucial because I needed to determine which specific California legislators represented each user.

For the technical implementation, I kept things lightweight and focused. I used plain HTML, CSS, and JavaScript without any heavy frameworks. This keeps the site fast and means it can be hosted almost anywhere with minimal resources.

The most interesting part was integrating with Google's Civic Information API. This service lets you look up elected officials based on a physical address. I set up a function that takes the user's address, queries the API, and returns both their State Senator and Assembly Member.

I ran into a few challenges along the way. One tricky part was handling the email addresses for legislators. At first, I tried maintaining a full database of California legislators with their contact info, but this approach had issues. I eventually simplified it to follow the standard email patterns used by the California legislature (senator.lastname@senate.ca.gov and assemblymember.lastname@assembly.ca.gov).

For the letter content, I crafted a template that makes a clear, concise case for including VFX in film incentives. The system automatically fills in the right legislator names and adds the user's personal information. It generates two separate letters - one for the State Senator and one for the Assembly Member.

I added some quality-of-life features like "copy to clipboard" buttons and tabbed navigation between the two letters. I also included clear instructions and a note about data privacy to reassure users that their information stays in their browser.

The site doesn't need a backend server since all the processing happens client-side in JavaScript. This makes it perfect for hosting on GitHub Pages, which is not only free but also secure and reliable.

I am pretty busy these days and I really only had one day to put this site together, so I used Claude.ai to help me with all the code and implementation.

Looking back, I'm happy with how the project turned out. It's a simple, focused tool that serves a specific purpose and hopefully will help amplify the voices of VFX workers in California who are advocating for fair treatment in the state's film incentive programs.

Thanks for checking it out! -- Sam Winkler