Adelaide Film Festival

A seamless digital festival experience.

Website with Ferve Ticketing Integration

Over a large portion of 2024, Rockethouse, in collaboration with the Adelaide Film Festival (AFF) and creative partners Studio OK-OK, designed and built the festival’s new digital platform. Our goal was to build a website with advanced features and systems, while ensuring users enjoyed an intuitive and captivating UI. Despite the complex technology behind the scenes, the website provides a seamless experience that allows users to explore the expansiveness of the festival.

Showcasing over 200 screenings.

As a renowned, week-long cultural event, the new Adelaide Film Festival website features over 200 screenings of 100+ films from 46 countries, including 15 world premieres and 34 Australian premieres. Not to mention, there’s over 150 Investment Fund projects and an archive of films and events spanning the last 21 years! Capturing this vast footprint was no small task. With such diverse content, the festival required a platform capable of managing its extensive offerings that inspired local, national and global audiences – all while maintaining and celebrating the event, its’ films and the ethos of the brand.

Blending creativity with technical precision.

From the beginning, it was clear that the site needed to reflect the cinematic scope of the festival. As design leads, OK-OK brought an understanding of the festival’s creative vision, ensuring that the website not only functioned seamlessly but embodied the festival’s visual nature. OK-OK established a direction that mirrored the creativity of the event in an engaging digital space. Their vision for the website’s layout, typographic approach, use of film imagery and overall user experience aligned organically with the collective blueprint we followed to develop the platform.

A crucial mix of design + technology.

Clear communication and collaboration were crucial throughout the process to ensure that the site’s advanced backend systems – such as ticketing, live scheduling and dynamic filtering – were implemented in ways that didn’t compromise the design. Our custom API integration was developed to ensure that the user experience felt effortless, despite the complexities of the technology and code behind it.

Creating the perfect balance.

We maintained a close relationship throughout the project, blending Studio OK-OK’s design clarity with Rockethouse’s technical expertise to create a cohesive, user-friendly platform. This partnership ensured the site achieved a balance between technical specificity, visual appeal and user ease – resulting in a platform that both celebrates the film industry’s creative culture and meets the practical needs of the festival and its audience.

Real-time ticketing integration.

One of the standout successes of the project was the seamless integration of the festival’s ticketing system, Ferve, into the website. Rockethouse’s implementation allowed real-time communication between the website and Ferve, enabling users to purchase tickets directly on the platform without meaningless redirects. This deep integration helped preserve Studio OK-OK’s design standards, ensuring consistency across all touch-points.

Film scheduling + planning.

Another key achievement was the design and development of an advanced schedule component that allows users to view all films by screening time, easily add events to their Watchlist and purchase tickets. We created a flexible, user-friendly system that updates in real-time, making it simple for users to manage and plan their festival experience. The schedule effortlessly integrates with Ferve, automatically listing films and events in order of what’s up next, eliminating the need for manual updates by the festival team and streamlining behind-the-scenes operations.

Visibility for a diverse festival program.

A particularly complex challenge was reconciling the differences between how films are listed in the program and how they are actually screened. With events, talks and films often presented differently, and short films frequently playing alongside feature films, it was crucial to develop a system that accurately highlighted everything. We implemented a solution that ensures every listing – regardless of length or format – receives equal visibility, providing recognition while spotlighting and celebrating the diversity of the festival and its program.

Streamlining content with a custom CMS.

At the heart of the website is a custom Content Management System (CMS), utilising Statamic, which serves as a central hub for everything the site offers. The CMS automatically consolidates all program information – from film listings to event schedules – into a single, cohesive ecosystem, making content management straightforward and efficient. Organisational content, such as information about the festival and its ongoing projects, is stored alongside the program with the unique ability to pull and cross-reference data across the website.

Boosting SEO through structured content.

This allows the festival team to update films, schedules and announcements in real-time with ease. The streamlined approach has significantly enhanced the team’s ability to manage the platform, ensuring the website remains accurate throughout the fast-paced festival period. In turn, the structured foundation helps improve SEO efficiency by ensuring content is organised, searchable and consistently up-to-date with relevant changes to the programming.

Shining light on unique stories.

Celebrating creativity and storytelling, by incorporating imagery at the forefront, the dedicated film pages are a standout feature of the new website. Each page offers detailed information – synopses, trailers, cast and crew details, screening times – and, most importantly, the ability to easily add tickets to your cart. By highlighting the visual elements, the design reinforces each film’s unique creative identity, providing filmmakers with a comprehensive, film-focused platform to connect with audiences and share their stories.

Films that live beyond the festival.

Beyond the festival, AFFIF (Adelaide Film Festival Investment Fund) films continue to live on through their individual pages. Integrated with Flicks, these pages allow users to discover where the films are screening post-festival while providing continued visibility and engagement long after the annual event has ended. The extended lifecycle of AFFIF films underscore the festival’s ongoing support of the industry and its commitment to showcasing creative works all year round.

Creating a personalised festival program.

A valuable feature of the new platform is its advanced filtering system, allowing users to explore films based on a variety of criteria, including genre, classification, location and more. The feature makes it easy to discover and share films that align with individual interests, while also clearly showcasing the festival’s diverse offerings. Additionally, the tool allows audiences – and even the social media team – to generate and share personalised programs that highlight unique selections of films.