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The Wisconsin Film Festival is the United States’ largest campus-based film festival. Presented by the University of Wisconsin-Madison’s Arts Institute in association with the Department of Communication Arts, the Film Fest presents over 150 films in eight theaters over eight days every April, as well as numerous film-related events.
We jumped at the chance to design and build the Film Fest’s 2015 site in collaboration with Arts Institute’s graphic design staff (art direction and branding) and UW’s Division of Information Technology (back-end Film Guide development). Festival staff needed a way to keep audiences informed of ticket information, and upcoming events, including the Children’s Cinema, a new addition to this year’s festival.
We put the 2015 Film Fest site on WordPress so they could manage all of this information with a few clicks. In addition, we built a “film of the day” widget, which used WordPress’ “Post” functionality and Advanced Custom Fields to tell visitors about a different film to look forward to each day in the month leading up to the Festival. This only required some data to be input by staff once, and well before the Festival began: they could set it and forget it.
The result of all of this work was a better-informed audience that required far less of the Film Fest staff’s day-to-day time and energy on the site.
