The challenge of creating trailers that run before every film at the Vancouver International Film Festival is to make something that keeps the interest of the film savvy festival-goers for the entire 16-day event.Our solution was to create a short film and divide it into sixteen scenes – one new scene for each day of the festival. We released the scenes non-linearly, and only gave people the URL: thewardensixteen.com as a tool to figure out what they were watching. At the site, people could watch the scenes, comment and move around the clips to figure out the story.

We released one scene from the film each day of the 16-day festival. Then we released them a day after their festival release, online at thewardensixteen.com. A day after the festival ended, we released the ‘original’ version of the film on the site.

The campaign was talked about throughout the Film Festival, but more importantly, people were engaged. Hundreds of people commented on the scenes and most people spent about 4 minutes on the site and came back multiple times. It was picked up in numerous advertising and film festival blogs, newspapers and award shows/sites. Ticket sales for the festival went up, and the client was ecstatic about being part of a campaign that not only advertised for the festival, it became part of the festival itself.