a web ecosystem for the most unique cinema in town

KEYWORDS

HTML & CSS, Preact, PHP, Laravel, MySQL, Voyager, WordPress, Project Management

Team

Website:

Anu Salumaa (NOPE) UI/UX design
Mihkel Eidast front-end
Hener Hoop full-stack
Pärt Erikson back-end
Lauri Kadajane PM

Back-end system:

Paavel Liik (Fraktal) design
Ivo Klaas back-end
Pärt Erikson full-stack
Andres Kalle full-stack
Lennar Kivimäe full-stack
Hener Hoop full-stack
Lauri Kadajane PM
Andres Kauts PO

THE BACKGROUND

What happens when a front-end developer and a UI/UX designer meet at their favorite cinema and discover that their website is old? Sounds like a bizarre beginning of an anecdote? Obviously they will start creating the best possible website for them! This is how the Elektriteater project started.

Driven by the love for films and enthusiasm for good user experience, gotoAndPlay teamed up with NOPE and took on a passion project to modernize Elektriteater’s homepage. What started off as a free pet-project for a few of us, ended up as a business opportunity for the whole team.

Elektriteater is the only arthouse cinema in Tartu and has focused their content on Estonian and European feature films and documentaries. Just like us, they opened in 2011 and they are also proud members of the Europa Cinemas Network. They differ from the other cinemas with their diverse movie programme that contains a large variety of film genres, including short films, animations, freak films, silent movie screenings with live music etc. In addition, they also have frequent Q&A sessions with Estonian filmmakers.

Elektriteater is a cozy place where movies that would go unnoticed by mainstream cinemas can get their well-deserved screen time.

THE CHALLENGE

The project began with a problem that the old homepage was outdated with a poor mobile experience and complicated content management system.

It soon became evident that the potential to minimize manual labor on the business side was also huge. As we progressed with the website, a new proposition came from our partner at Elektriteater. In addition to building a website they also needed us to build a one of a kind back-end system solution for the cinema that would automate a ton of paperwork for them and in total save hundreds of hours per year in accounting, reporting and management.

All the transparent hand-drawn pictures in the backgound were done by the wonderful Paula Mauer, who designs tickets and posters for Elektriteater.
Using Preact we are able to construct custom seating plan and booking form for specific cinema.

WEBSITE

As hardcore cinema fans, we were also the target group, having a good insight and a vision for what the new homepage should be like. With the look and feel we wanted to enhance Elektriteater’s principle that the cinema experience does not just start with pressing “play”, but already when you enter through the cinema doors – we wanted to take this a step further and have the experience begin when you browse elektriteater.ee. We wanted to give the website the feeling you get when visiting an old friend – you’re welcome anytime and any day.

The visual look was inspired by old movie theatres lined with eye-catching posters that create the same amount of excitement as candy boxes generate for kids – you want to try every single one of them. The website was now great to use on smaller screens and mobile phones as well.

Besides freshening up the UI, the new website got some new features that enable Elektriteater to share additional content such as photo galleries and there’s even the possibility to listen to the recordings of the past Q&A’s with filmmakers.

The website is managed by WordPress CMS. The cinema back-office is well acquainted with the platform.

Back-end PLATFORM

Most of the work on this project was done around digitalisation and automation of business processes. There are a couple of similar products already on the market but none of those are meant for the business models that we designed this one for. It is a system specifically meant for smaller cinemas and theatres.

The product owner Andres on Elektriteater’s side already had a vision on what the back-end system was going to look like. He was very hands-on during the whole process and even sketched the first wireframes to describe the business requirements. Soon after the platform had a name “Kinola” and got visual touches by Fraktal Design Agency.

We used Laravel for creating this system. Laravel is a PHP framework we have a lot of previous experience with. Therefore it was an easy choice to go with. The database is based on MySQL.

Elektriteater is part of the Europa Cinemas Network and also the The Estonian Authors’ Society, they have an obligation to report on how many people saw a particular screening along with some other data on it.
The system contains all the information on the movies that are being screened in Elektriteater currently. It automatically refreshes the information if something were to change and also advertises the movies to the viewers.

but what does this beast of a program do?

UPDATING THE WEBPAGE

The system contains all the information on the movies that are being screened in Elektriteater currently. It automatically refreshes the information if something were to change and also advertises the movies to the viewers.

REPORTING

Because Elektriteater is part of the Europa Cinemas Network and also the The Estonian Authors’ Society, they have an obligation to report on how many people saw a particular screening along with some other data on it. The back-end system compiles all of the data automatically and all the human user needs to do is click a button to generate the report and then confirm that all of the data is correct.

CUSTOM SEATING PLANS

The program also allows the admin to make custom cinema hall seating plans, seat types (e.g. couple seats!) and sell  tickets accordingly. Up until this point they had been selling seats based on “the early bird gets the best spot” type of system.

SNACKS & DRINKS

The back-end system supports sale of snacks and drinks to enjoy with the movie experience. Not only that, cinema merch as well!

THE FUTURE

Although Elektriteater is unique, their business model is not. There are many other smaller cinemas and theatres out there. The problems they face are similar and that’s why we see that there is a great opportunity to start offering the same back-end solution to other similar businesses.

We have enjoyed the process in the next potential success story, where a small cinema becomes a big SaaS company.

Feedback from the client

We have collaborated with gotoAndPlay on various projects for several years and the experience has been great. They are incredibly smart and experienced in their field and are our go-to partners for new projects. Their knowledge has been invaluable when forming our ideas into actual working products and they have stood by us even trough some rather complex times.

Andres Kauts
Founder of Elektriteater

FUN FACTS ABOUT OUR PARTNERSHIP

  • All of gotoAndPlay employees can watch movies at Elektriteater for free.
  • In 2018 we joined forces with NOPE and Elektriteater to organize a public cinema session in the backyard of our office. Over a 100 people came. See more.
  • During the last 12 months over 47 000 people have visited the site, that’s almost half of the population living in Tartu.

Check out website