Tropfest Watch

Tropfest came to us with a long term challenge, how do we get fans to interact and engage with us all year round, and not just in the short months leading up to the Festival? We needed to create a curated and immersive brand experience that will support and promote Tropfest's key messages and ideology. We had to bring the storytelling to life. The brief was to create a platform that offers a richer and more engaging short film experience for the Festival's massive online audience.

The platform was to house all Tropfest's back catalogue from 2011 - 2015, as well as the shortlisted films and winners films from 2016. We had to think about how best to create an immersive and engaging experience. Our main challenge was to ensure that the user experience is kept simple and intuitive with a seamless information architecture. Our main challenge was to present all of the curated video content in a logical manner that allowed the user to find and view their video/s of choice easily on both desktop and mobile devices. A lot of thought was also needed with the user journey. We had to dig deep and consider how users coming from different sources might navigate through the site.

We wanted to create an extraordinary platform for 'Watch' that really brings the viewing experience to another level. The platform UX was created with an app interface in mind to transform 'Watch' from 'just another website that plays videos' to an immersive and engaging platform. We wanted to bring the experience of storytelling to live by emulating a theatre. It had to be different from what's already available on Youtube.

Tropfest is the world's largest short film festival. It all started in Sydney, Australia with a man, a cafe and one simple idea. 23 years on, Tropfest has become the world's largest short film festival and an iconic cultural event in countries in Asia Pacific, the US and New Zealand. Tropfest Australia attracts a live national audience of around 150,000 people on a single night.