Hey all,
Hope everyone's having a rad summer (or a wild winter if you're Southern Hemispherian).
Given that we're in the height of festival season and in light of
What the heck is that? Well since we can't all physically meet up and rock out together, I thought we can at least get together virtually to let our hair down. I wanted to create a place where we can play our favourite tunes, exchange photos of our summer fun and share rando goodwill video and audio messages.
So, ladies and gentlemen, I bring you Formfest 2022 – an interactive virtual festival where YOU get to help set the agenda. It's very simple (hopefully):
- Fill out this typeform nominating the song for the setlist, record a video or audio shout out, and add a photo of you enjoying the summer.
- Visit the Formfest 2022 website to play the setlist, watch the shout-outs, and see the photos. #goodvibesonly
What do you think? If you're interested to know how we built this, click through to the tutorial…
How to build a virtual festival experience like ours
Tools you'll need:
1. The typeform
We wanted to create a collaborative festival where people could choose their tunes, upload video/audio messages and share photos.
So we created a typeform to collect the information and assets we need. We'll then automatically embed the songs, videos and photos onto our online festival website in real time.
After welcoming the person and giving some more info about the project, we follow this up with a question where we ask for their song choice.
This info will then be used to retrieve the song from Spotify and add it to our embedded playlist.
We added a File Upload question for people to upload a photo of them having fun, which we'll use in the gallery on our virtual festival website.
Finally, we created a videoask which we embedded into the typeform to collect a video or a voice message. We'll then share these messages automatically on the website in an embed.
On the ending screen, we included a button linking to the virtual festival website so people can go check it out once they are done.
2. The videoask
The videoask we created was pretty straightforward. I recorded a very simple (if a little overly excited) intro explaining things, and then added an open-ended answer type, allowing people to choose between recording an audio or video message. We then applied the contact details form so we know who is giving the shout out (this will be displayed when we embed the messages in our website).
3. The Spotify playlist
One of the central elements of this project was to build a shared playlist (a bit like the one I created for the Community's top tunes of 2021). We wanted people to be able to submit their song via the typeform and for it to be added to the playlist.
The first step of this is to create the playlist in Spotify. We called ours "Formfest 2022" which we set as a "Collaborative playlist".
4. The Zap
We used Zapier to send the song choice from the typeform into the Spotify playlist. This is pretty simple to set up. You start by telling Zapier to connect the two apps…
Then connect your Typeform account and select your festival contribution form:
Next, you need to connect your Spotify account and tell Zapier to pull the song you want to look up from the answer to the "tell us your track" question in the typeform.
Finally, set up a third action in Zapier to add the found song to the playlist. It works pretty well, though we found that the system is more accurate when the answer includes both the track name and the artist, so we made this clear in the question.
5. The website
To tie everything together into one spectacular crowd-created virtual festival we built a website in Wix to house all of the content collected through the typeform. This didn't take long, we just picked a preset theme and tinkered with it to achieve the end result.
We included three main sections for the community-generated content:
- A "tunes" section, where we embedded the playlist by copying the embed code from the "Share" button in Spotify and pasting it into the HTML settings of the block in Wix.
- A "shout outs" section to publish the audio and video messages coming through our videoask. To do this you need to select the "Share all interactions" option from VideoAsk and then copy and paste the embed code into Wix.
- The third content block in Wix is the Pro Gallery, where we'll upload all the selfies and photos that people send through the File Upload question block in the typeform. We then manually add the submitted pictures using the "Manage media" option.
This is the only step of the process I haven't figured out how to do automatically (barring using a Business Instagram account) so any ideas would be most welcome!
To complete our virtual festival site in Wix we embedded the content submission typeform at the end of the page so people can collaborate if they haven't already.
And that's it – a pretty rough and ready way to create a community-sourced virtual festival. I'm sure there are slicker ways to do the implementation, and even more possible applications for the workflow beyond a music festival.
Would love to hear if this is useful for you. What other cool things do you think you could create with this flow to engage your own audience?
