Tech specialists reinvents city’s biggest arts festival
Smart tech specialist Sauce is helping reinvent Hull’s Freedom Festival, the city’s biggest arts festival as an interactive, year-round digital experience.
The festival which was established in 2007 and has developed a reputation as one of the UK’s leading and most innovative cultural and arts events, will not go ahead in its normal format this year after large public gatherings were banned because of Covid-19.
Instead the festival will be delivered online, featuring a unique programme of events broadcast digitally via an app developed by the Hull-Based Sauce.
The firm had already been working on an app to complement the traditional festival, which was to include key information such as dates, times, locations and descriptions of events and performances for people to attend. However. following lockdown, the focus quickly changed to developing a platform through which audiences could digitally access events and performances.
As a result the app was adapted and further developed so that it will be used to host interactive performances throughout the year, not just during the festival. I
Jim Wardlaw, chief of product and design at Sauce, said, “The Freedom Festival team were already looking to develop an app to improve the overall experience and enable the festival to be more interactive.
“The project changed pretty rapidly as soon as we went into lockdown because everyone realised we had to plan for a very different festival.
“We redeveloped the app to be able to host performances and, working in partnership with Freedom, we were also able to provide consultation about the best ways to stream different types of events and performances.
“Freedom Festival will now be able to reach audiences via the app throughout the year, not just over one weekend. It will also allow Freedom to engage more with audiences in the long term. They’ll be able to use push notifications to get feedback and gauge opinion, which they’ll then be able to act on.”
Mikey Martins, artistic director and joint chief executive of the Freedom Festival Arts Trust, said, “It’s been brilliant working with Sauce because it’s been a creative collaboration.
“We needed an app that would be informative and have all the right times, dates and details, but it also needed to reflect what we are – intuitive, flexible and creative. That’s exactly what Sauce are too, so it has been a perfect partnership.
“The app will be a brilliant product for us to use over the festival weekend but it will also become a platform through which we can deliver performances throughout the year. We’ll be able to stage something whenever we feel it’s appropriate and we’ll be able to communicate with our audience any time we wish to.
“It is a real positive to have come out of this whole situation and, longer term, will prove to be a huge benefit for us.”
The digital Freedom Festival 2020, branded as “Freedom at Home”, will take place from Friday, September 4 to Sunday, September 6. Using the app developed by Sauce, which is available on iOS and Android app stores, audiences will be able to access “intimate and thought-provoking” performances featuring international talent, as well as local acts.
