Vancouver Queer Film Festival App

In summer 2010, the Vancouver Queer Film Festival celebrated its 22nd year. As the creative agency of record for the festival, we suggested that they celebrate the big 2-2 with something new: an iPhone app that resonated with the film fest’s growing audience.

We started by answering one of the questions we most frequently hear at film festivals: “What are you going to see?” However, the app’s built-in schedule did more than allow filmgoers to keep track of movies, parties, and other events. It also allowed audience members to compare schedules just by bumping their phones together—earning an “official” rating of compatibility with each other in the process. For good measure, we tossed a pick-up line generator into the app: love is a fickle mistress, after all.

In the midst of all this techno-flirting, we made sure our app informed and entertained our audience. This meant a slideshow of 22 years of film festival posters, venue information and other fun goodies for folks to enjoy during festival downtime. Finally, to spread the film fest spirit across the city, we built a real-world treasure hunt into our app, using geolocation to help filmgoers explore the city while giving an extra shout-out to festival sponsors.

Within a few weeks of its release, the Vancouver Queer Film Festival app had exceeded our expectations in terms of downloads and received multiple 5-star user reviews. As successful as the app was, we’ll have our work cut out for us next year—we’ve already been asked to do build on its success for 2011’s film festival.