Sydney Film Festival — Rekindling a passion for one of Australia's oldest festivals

Against the backdrop of GFC fears and changes in attendance patterns, Sydney Film Festival engaged Boccalatte to create innovative new narratives to drive new audiences. While considered ‘intellectual’ and ‘austere’ in previous incarnations, our role was to reinvent SFF as more accessible without disenfranchising loyalist or dumbing the Festival down.

Action

We believe that festivals, like all cultural events, raise questions about identity, style, commerce and beauty. They are a place of shared experiences—playful, creative and adventurous. They can be mysterious, provocative and even challenging. At a time when some of us are searching for the next big social network, we believe that we need look no further than the world around us.

Festivals offer us real but heightened experiences, often in the most simple but profound ways. Culture allows us to have real-life encounters with ourselves, with the community, with the city and with the rest of the world. Culture creates a place to become rapt, immersed or simply surprised.

We worked with Sydney Film Festival to create connections and pathways to all levels of the cinematic experience. People attend the Sydney Film Festival for a variety of reasons but, as the research showed, stories, emotional experiences, immersion and escapism are the most important. Working across platforms—from the trailer (with Photoplay) to the environmental design to the program—and incorporating diverse audiences from film buffs, to single ticket buyers and red carpet fanatics, we delivered a design strategy that enabled these different audiences to sit perfectly together.

Impact

“Creativity is just connecting things,” Steve Jobs once said. Culture connects too. It connects experiences, ideas and people. These creative connections nourish and enrich us. According to UK’s Future Laboratory, this decade’s first revolution is marked by a bold shift from passive acceptance to affirmative, anarchic collaboration.

Disruption is the consumer’s new mantra, dissonance a new way of marketing. Organisations will need to innovate continuously, not in incremental ways, but in disruptive, game-changing ones.