The Half Moon Theatre is a professional theatre production company based in Limehouse, East London. With a strong production heritage and ethos of community inclusivity since the 1970’s, the Half Moon has created a rich and varied historical archive and is known for bold work including Berkoff’s ‘Sink the Belgrano!’, ‘The Resistible Rise of Arturo Ui’, ‘Can’t Pay? Won’t Pay!’ and casting Frances de la Tour as a female Hamlet.
Following a recommendation received for the branding, design and digital work we undertook for the Chichester Festival Theatre’s ‘Pass It On’ digital archive project (passiton.cft.org.uk), the Half Moon Theatre approached us to competitively tender for an exciting Heritage Lottery Funded digital archive project – ‘Stages of Half Moon’.
After working together to prepare the competitive pitch, our team was delighted to win the commission. Our brief was to design, develop and digitally produce the ‘Stages of Half Moon’ – a stand-alone and accessible online community resource that would feature a range of still images, scans, archive material, audio visual material, and specially filmed productions and interviews with people associated with the theatre’s rich history.
In our experience, digital technology has the ability to inspire and transform communications. However, in order to be really effective and ensure long-term success, digital archive projects such as ‘Stages of Half Moon’ need the full engagement, interaction, understanding and involvement of people – the personalities that have contributed to the development of the theatre since the 1970s.
Buzzword’s plan was to build in community inclusivity – to involve people in the site, create an engaging user experience, inspire exploration, improve continuous engagement, promote user retention and create dialogue with the Theatre.
Despite our involvement in the design and branding of the Chichester Festival Theatre project, our approach and process was not a simple copy of what had been delivered before. Instead, we worked to technically develop and configure a new interactive archive, a fresh approach and response to the bespoke and very specific database build and search and display required by Half Moon.
At the same time, we were able to develop a well-articulated user experience strategy – an integral part of our discovery phase when approaching a project of this nature – that served the team well at the pitch stage of the process.
Importantly, our understanding and experience of database, resource and archive delivery within a theatre and creative environment as well as depth of understanding of community involvement participation should enable our creative, branding and web development team to produce a new product that the Half Moon Theatre will be proud of; a product that will be used as a resource for many years to come.
Following the database build and creative execution, the ‘Stages of Half Moon’ website is scheduled to go live at the end of June 2016.
For more information on this project, please call Rhys Davies, our Client Development Director on 01243 792146.
