Software development & consultancy
Greenbelt festival newspaper
Greenbelt Festivals
Greenbelt wanted to give people at the festival a sense of everything that had been happening, making use of the reports of people who were there, so they decided it would be fun to print the internet.
Greenbelt festival hosts some 20,000 people over the August Bank Holiday weekend. Vast amounts of creativity and effort go into telling people who aren't there what's going on, with photographs, blog posts, video, twitter, and all manner of things from official teams, and from festivalgoers themselves.
When you're actually at the festival it can be quite hard to get that sense of what's happening across the whole site, so Greenbelt decided to try and bring that online activity to festivalgoers on site.
We worked, together with James Stewart from Ket Lai, to create a newspaper from online activity during the festival. Our criteria were that the content had to have originated online, be about the festival and have been created during the festival.
We used Adobe's InDesign layout software, together with some automation magic of our own, and pulled together a 16-page tabloid-format newspaper in just three days. 4,000 copies were printed by a newspaper printing plant on the Sunday evening, and we were able to begin distributing it around site on Sunday night.
The paper was extremely well received, and we and Greenbelt are looking at ways to build on this concept at 2010's festival.
