An Honorary Heist Inspired by the Syndicate You Know Best…
On October 19, 2025 in Paris, France, some items were “taken” from the Louvre Museum. In a four minute heist to locate eight of the world’s most prized possessions, the premises were swept without a trace, except for a ninth jewel
that was left behind at the scene. Since then, the internet has completely inspected the “crime” from third, really fourth degree investigative lens and triangulated the alleged mode of entry, exit, motivation, and the what. However,
the internet does not know the where or now. Well, that is going to be answered quite quickly as you continue reading.
As an experts of the game of “lost and found”…the pieces from the Louvre are nicely placed, protected, and well… up for “ransom” if you will. Anyone with a good eye can see the delicacy and beauty in these pieces. So, these pieces
are in need of a new home, and they are under process for repossession. Make your choice, place your bet, and curate your new closet.
Understanding the precision and delicacy it takes to pull off an untraceable heist as such requires the artistry and finesse of someone or someone’s who are very well established in the game. Work so refined and distinguished its almost
recognizable, infamous.
From the likes of the Bellagio and Willy Bank in Las Vegas, Nevada, Europol across Amsterdam, Rome, and the Met Gala in New York, you’ve seen these “games” or “performances” or whatever you may call them at many places with many different
stakes. But as the saying goes…
“The house always wins”
Danny Ocean, Oceans 11 (2001)
Creator’s Choice
Inside the creator’s artistic mind
For this particular project, I was inspired by the Louvre robbery and my love for the Ocean’s franchise. While creating this project, I was inspired by the swiftness of the robbery, as it was all over TikTok– people analyzing the methods in which the thieves used, the jewels they took, how many of them there were, etc. From here, I was intrigued and began to formulate how I could creatively utilize the heist to make a clever story. So, that’s how I incorporated the movie franchise to suite both the commerce site and the content site. The movie theme was the perfect way to bridge the gap.
I created a hypothetical storyline that the thieves from the Louvre were in fact not finished with their mission and that this was not an isolated incident. This was in fact the most recent act in their most final series of robberies, but this time, they decided to adapt to the age of commerce and sell their findings on line through an untraceable page and server where they would make over a 200% profit from each piece.
With small bits of inspiration from the ‘Now You See Me” franchise as well, these “lost and found” gems would be won in a online bidding auction in which the bidding room floor for each piece would be unlocked in a series very difficult casino games that could take average players days to complete and the most advanced players hours possibly. (Take note from the quotation section using poker terms for the quote names)
Technical
On the technical side, I utilized the theme Silverstorm which uses Colibri in WordPress to configure itself. It was tricky to ideate how I initially wanted the page to look, however, the theme was quite perfect as a baseline and ver similar to what I had imagined in my head. Because of the Colibri aspect of the plugins, I felt it was difficult to show and demonstrate my diverse uses of different kinds of boxes.
Theme
Silver Storm
Plugins
Colibri: Page Builder for Silverstorm
Woo Commerce
Online Shop
Gutenberg
Block Editor
Yoast
Page Duplicator:
Front Page Structure for “Home” and “Bidding Room Floor”
Secondly, I had a hard time changing the background color of this page to match the home page to be dark and moody. However, I assume that since this page was technically created in Wordpres as posts, this is why, as only the column
is editable.
My biggest difficulty came from creating the web pages initially to begin with. When trying to add the ending of the html to read “webdev/project-three/commerce” and the same for the content, the page became inoperable. So, I had to
work with the original link as is in order to prevent this.
WordPress certainly made the page creation much easier, however, I really can’t believe I am saying this, but I may actually prefer coding with bootstrap and classic VS code. I feel the utmost creative freedom and although it is very
frustrating and time consuming, I feel it allows for complete control, understanding, flexibility, and it is highly rewarding.
As I start to get more fluent with WordPress, I feel I could really make some great things with it and I am excited.
Blog
In the blog portion of the site, aesthetically did not quite turn out the way I wanted because of the Colibri limitations. I wanted to have the image in each posting be on top of the titles of each post on the blog posting page before clicking into each entry. However, the header image was locked as a repeated and would not allow me to put different images for each post. Unfortunately, I had to remove these stylistic headers and just leave the titles.
Bidding Room Floor
This portion of the site serves as the gamified “entry way” to be able to place a bid for one of the jewels. This takes place on a casino floor, through a series of games allowing each player to advance until finals, where they can have the chance to purchase one of the royal items with a big starting at the listed price.
Here, I used chatGPT, prompting it to help me create an elaborate game from the tone of the rest of the site and all the creative description I provided above. From here, I duplicated the home page, using Yoast, to clone the content and structure in order to make it stand out and not just look like one of the other content pages.
I did have trouble with the Calibri plugin as I wanted the header to mimic the slideshow and style used on the formal homepage. Calibri was quite difficult to work around as the sizing of the boxes are not that easy to manipulate as well as the color backgrounds when used in combination with the defaul editor on WordPress.
Oceans Incorporated (About)
This page was used as the author/creator reflection page to understand my stylistic choices as well as give a semi conclusion to the rest of the site (both commerce and content) for completion.
“These Boots Were Made For Walking”
The Oceans soundtrack has its staples for sure but from ocean’s 8, I would certainly say this particular song with the advertising and marketing of the movie stood out from the others.
The energy, the instrumentals, and the messaging really hook, line, and sink the cutthroat playfulness and sly rhythm one would have to have to make it anywhere near the bidding floor.
