
Designing For Festivals
Over the years, we've been involved in bringing a few festivals online, including
- Melbourne International Film Festival
- Melbourne Festival
- L'Oreal Fashion Festival
- Whitenight Festival
- Antipodes Festival
- Greek Film Festival
- La Mirada Festival
- Dungog Film Festival
Designing for festivals presents unique challenges. Its these challenges that keep us keen (along with our love for film, music and arts - and the rush of launch and the relief of wrap)
In general terms (in our experience, no two festivals are exactly alike), designing and developing for festival involves
- Re-aligning the festival 'corporate brand' (the consistent brand) with a festival image that may change from year to year with each festival launch
- Strong emphasis on mobile responsive design, delivering key funcionality including calendar planning and ticket purchasing to users with mobile devices (who are as likely to be standing in a queue as sitting next to the fire with their laptop and a nice scotch)
- The websites needs to integrate the online world with real-world events
- Clear pathways from event discovery to ticket purchase: Streamlined pathways from event awareness, to planning, to purchasing and then to social media word of mouth spread.
- Respecting the artistic integrity of the content
- Server environment that needs to be able to handle extremely high demand for short periods (during the actual festival and its leadup)
Festivals also have the potential to become aggregators - providing tools to aggregate an artists and producers with existing online folio - i.e.. To pull in works from online media source - i.e. Vimeo.com, youtube, flickr.com, dribble.com, cargocollective.com or soundcloud.com.
Certain activities are concentrated at certain periods whilst others need maintenance year-round.
Non festival time |
Program launch |
Festival Period While the event is on |
Post event wrap up |
|
Developer Activity |
Creating folio aggregator devices and digital contributions presentation device |
Import of program Program information maintenance |
Program information maintenance |
Archiving of years program |
Festival Admin Activity |
Inviting potential contributors (artists, producers, distributors etc) to participate; handle submisssions; marketing activies (announcements, program sneak peaks) leading up to the program launch |
Program information maintenance |
Program information maintenance |
Survey of patrons, members. |
Server requirements |
Minimal |
High to extremely high |
High to extremely high |
Minimal |
Festival Admin Activity |
Managing sign-ups, donations and maintaining engagement through newsletters and social media |
|||
User Activity |
Patron sign-ups, donations |
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