Sheffield Adventure Film Festival Director Matt Heason reflects on the live launch of new film festival audience voting app vot.io...

Beautiful Everything are a new digital experience agency based in Sheffield. They are actually based in the same building that ShAFF takes place in so when the guys there approached us about working to develop a new web based app to allow people to rate the films they had just watched at the festival we were, to say the least, very keen!

March 2nd saw the first outing of vot.io at a Best Of ShAFF screening at the Showroom. The guys came along and I stood on stage and asked members of the audience to try the app out, using the free wifi in the cinema, to log onto the short url and score the films they had just watched out of 10. Although the trial worked well, it raised more questions than it answered and provided a very useful real-life test case on which to go back to the office with, in the knowledge that there was just three weeks until the festival proper. 

Ten years ago I have vivid memories of sitting alone in the Showroom bar for much of the weekend as the visitors to ShAFF pulsed in and out of the cinemas, a handful of volunteers about, feeling that it really wasn't very festival like. Fast forward a decade and it couldn't have been more different. We now have a dedicated volunteer team of nearly 40 people - techs, judges, presenters, interviewers and more. 

Ed, Jonathan, Ian and Paul from Beautiful Everything set up camp amidst the hustle and bustle and worked around the clock, literally sleeping in their office between shifts, to launch vot.io to the world. They've blogged about the novelty of being immersed in a live deployment here so I'll not expand on that, suffice to say that it looked like hard work as well as a lot of fun (much like running the actual festival!).

So how did vot.io perform and how did it go down with the audience? Stunningly I'd say. Essentially a tool by which to measure the People's Choice - i.e. the film most highly rated by the visitors to the festival - it did just that. Where other festivals employ papers, pens and voting swayed by enthusiastic filmmakers vot.io provided a fair and corruption-free method of data capture, as well as providing users with some useful information on other similar films to those they had scored, and even where to watch trailers and buy online. 

Users were prompted to enter a unique code - unique to them for any given film session - and score each film on a scale of 1-10. Having a unique code meant that nobody could post it on social media channels in order to generate remote voting - you had to have been in the session in order to vote. 

Engagement was an impressive at more than 25%, and feedback from users was uniformly excellent. The live launch meant that the developers were able to immediately see potential improvements and are already working on them, with a view to not just using vot.io at ShAFF next year, but at other festivals all around the world.

The future of vot.io looks bright indeed. Phase one has proved that the concept works, and that today's phone and tablet savvy generations are willing to embrace innovative solutions to age-old problems. The concept of rewarding users with rich information about the films they have just watched, and how to take a next step that they didn't necessarily know was there, is incredibly exciting. 

I'm looking forward to ShAFF 2016 already and imagining we can now help visitors to decide on which films to watch based on what they saw this year, advising them of how to plan their time at the festival, and that at the end of a session a phone might discretely vibrate in a pocket inviting the viewer to score the films they've just watched, gathering data and enriching the festival experience for everybody. 

It's given me as festival director some invaluable insight into which films people liked, and perhaps more importantly, which ones they didn't. There is more subtle data in there too - did people really like a film, or really dislike it or was it an even spectrum of scores? I see scope for cross-festival people's choice winners, a deeper tie in with the programming of the festival, and plenty more besides. 
 
In the meantime here is the result of this year's ShAFF People's Choice Award, as powered by vot.io.

More about vot.io:

• Read the ShAFF press release about the People's Choice Award, powered by vot.io
• Read Beautiful Everything's blog about launching vot.io at ShAFF.
• Contact Ed Richardson at Beautiful Everything: E: ed@beautifuleverything.co.uk / M: 07956 874984 / W: www.beautifuleverything.co.uk / T: @btflevrthng
• Download the one-page pdf guide to vot.io