Designing For Festivals

Designing For Festivals

By Luke| February 19th 2013 | festival

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
In lead up to festival

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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