Keep it simple: Connect to specialized tools

A lot of festivals wish to have an ‘all-in-one’ software program for festival organizing. Some festivals even choose to invest in their own ‘all-in-one’ solution, which seems smart in the beginning, but usually ends up in high costs and a complex system to manage along the way.

What if your overall solution consists of multiple, smaller solutions? All made by specialists, taking care of a specific part of the process. This brings down the complexity immediately.

To make this ideal situation work, it is crucial to have a good core system. One that connects all individual solutions, creating one central data hub by means of an API. Then, there will be no more need for separate Excel feeds, or other manual database work.

With this vision, we have created Fiona.

By using Fiona as the core for your festival, you can make your possibilities endless! But at your own pace. Let’s look at some examples of proven teamwork between Fiona and other software.

When creating your festival programme in Fiona, you are able to publish the content real time to your website and apps and easily keep it up to date. Connecting your website to Fiona will cost the smallest effort. This connection will eliminate the manual process of uploading files, images and other files to an online platform. Which is a great time saver! Experience with other festivals has proven that deadline dates can be shortened with days or even weeks.

We have a lot of experience connecting Fiona to various ticketing systems. It will give your team the flexibility to choose and use your favorite ticketing system. The connection with Fiona becomes particularly interesting as soon as a festival integrates ticket sales into the festival website or app.

Digital projection made life a lot easier for festivals and cinemas. However the distribution and management of digital rights files (KDM) and projection files (DCP) is often still complex. Fiona already provides the ability to distribute KDM files through our Dropbox connection across various projection servers. A new interesting development comes from a Dutch company called FilmFetch. FilmFetch is a sustainable and safe way to send DCP files to film festivals. Want to know more? We wrote an article with more info about Fiona’s connection to FilmFetch.

Create a secure and safe environment that allows external programmers or jury members to watch and review movie previews online. Fiona publishes the links of these movies to the preview platform, controls the authentication of viewers and records the ratings of viewers. We have integrated various preview platforms such as PicturePipe and Duyser video platform.

IFFR (International Film Festival Rotterdam) has developed a system to convert film and programme information from Fiona to a format for InDesign. This allows the festival to produce a catalog during the most hectic period of the festival in a highly efficient way.

IFFR offers this system to other Fiona users.

It sounds obvious, but I want to mention them anyway. All versions of Fiona offer the ability to directly link or import documents or folders from Dropbox, GoogleDrive, or OneDrive. This will help you to share in Fiona, for example, scripts or contracts with your festival colleagues. No more excel management!

Any thoughts you would like to share? Or would you like to see how Fiona could benefit your festival? Let us know by contacting us.