Fantasia

A planning tool for Fantasia festival-goers

Client

Fantasia Film Festival

Year

2003 - 2017

Expertise

  • Content Strategy
  • UI Design
  • UX Design

Since its inception in 1996, Montreal’s Fantasia Film Festival has grown to be one of the most important fantasy, horror, and anime festivals in the world, with an international audience that truly defines the word “fanatic”.

A Bloody Fantastic Digital Partnership

As Fantasia’s digital partner from 2003 – 2017, Plank worked closely with the festival to deploy new features each year to keep the fans’ gore-levels satisfied. The festival website serves as the cornerstone of their marketing strategy and the primary tool through which they provide fans with ever-changing, up-to-the-minute festival information. Over the course of our partnership, we invested in important updates each year—overhauling assets and layouts and improving information architecture—to keep the site current and relevant for their enthusiastic audience.

A Better Way to Manage Behind-The-Scenes

Plank rebuilt a custom film and content management system from the ground up, supporting a cross-publishing system that produces the largest print program ever (450+ pages!). The new CMS allowed festival staff to add and update the 300+ films shown each year in a one spot, serving to provide content for both the website and the festival’s printed catalogue—developed by our print partner, Em Dash Design. This new workflow centralized their internal process by removing the need for manual duplications of content for print and web.

Responsive Overhaul

Thanks to new funding from SODEC in 2017, we implemented some major improvements to Fantasia’s digital platform. A complete responsive design overhaul made sure the site looks great whether users were accessing from their desktop, phone, or tablet. We also migrated more of Fantasia’s backend to Zone Festival, a Quebec-based event management system.

About the client

Since its inception in 1996, Montreal’s Fantasia Film Festival has grown to be one of the most important fantasy, horror, and anime festivals in the world, with an international audience that truly defines the word “fanatic”.

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