For festivals
Your programme is the work of a year. For the person holding it, it is also a puzzle: forty films they want, ten days, six venues across a city, and everything clashing with everything. Festival Planner solves that puzzle, and it can do it wearing your name.
What it does
Someone browses your programme, marks the films they want and says which evenings they are free. The planner returns a schedule with no clashes — and it allows for the time it takes to get from one venue to the next, so it will not seat a person in two cinemas twenty minutes apart. They can swap any screening for another showing of the same film, export the whole thing to their calendar, save it as an image, or plan it together with the friend they are going with: the films they both want at the same screenings, the rest of each list around them.
A finished plan also turns into a ticket list: every screening in the order it comes, a link to buy each one, and a tick for the ones already bought.
Every film also gets a page of its own, with its screenings, its synopsis and a link back to your site — so someone searching for one title lands on that film rather than on a wall of a hundred.
What you get out of it
A planner in your colours, with your logo, at an address you can link from your own programme page. Every screening can carry a link straight to your box office, which is the part that matters: a person who has just built a plan is a person about to buy tickets.
You also get to see what your audience wants before booking opens. Not who they are — nothing here identifies anybody — but which films are being saved, and how often. A programmer can read that in the week between announcement and sale, when an extra screening is still possible. After the festival you get a short report: how many people planned with it, how many films and seats they planned, and when they came.
How it is built
No account needed, no advertising, no tracking cookies, nothing sold to anyone. That is not a feature list, it is the whole design: a plan lives in the reader’s own browser. Someone who wants the same lists on their phone and laptop can sign in with Google, and then we keep their email address, a username and their lists, on servers in the EU, and nothing else. It works on a phone in a cinema foyer, which is where it is actually used.
The festivals on the site were set up from their public programmes, as tests with real audiences; the largest of them is Busan, with close to eight hundred screenings across twenty-four screens. You can open any of them from the front pageand use it exactly as your audience would — that is a better answer than anything on this page.
What it takes from you
Very little. Send your programme and schedule in whatever form you already have them — a spreadsheet, a feed, a press file — and the setup is mine to do. When a screening moves, tell me and it moves the same day. The English text is included; other languages can be added.
Who is behind it
One person. I worked on the programme side of a film festival, and I built the first version of this for myself, to get through twenty-odd films at the Istanbul Film Festival without missing any. There is no festival, distributor or advertiser behind it, which is why there is nothing on the page trying to sell your audience anything.
Get in touch
Tell me which edition you are thinking of and roughly how big it is, and I will come back with what it would involve. If you would rather just ask a question first, that is fine too.
Zahid Balta · Istanbul
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