Working with the fab teams at Woolwich Works and Edinburgh International Festival, we created a neat process for ticketing the complex immersive experience, 'Dreamachine'.

What is 'Dreamachine'?

Part of the UK’s Unboxed festival (a series of cultural events, and sister project to the 2022 Commonwealth Games in Birmingham), Dreamachine is an immersive experience, which is touring venues all across the UK throughout 2022.

From the Dreamachine website:
"Created by Collective Act, in collaboration with Turner Prize-winning artists Assemble, Grammy- and Mercury-nominated composer Jon Hopkins, and a team of leading technologists, scientists and philosophers, Dreamachine invites you on a magical journey to explore the extraordinary potential of your mind. Conjured entirely by light and music, the colourful world of the Dreamachine will unfold behind your closed eyes – created by your own brain and completely unique to you."

As it’s an immersive experience, Dreamachine requires comprehensive health and safety checks for everyone who books. It also includes lots of accessibility options, to make it as inclusive an experience as possible. Added to this, the Dreamachine experience has had rave reviews – making it very likely to be very popular. All of this is great – but makes it an unusual and highly complex event to ticket.

To sum-up:

Not only is this a highly complex event to ticket but, because details of Unboxed projects were kept under wraps until shortly before they launched, no one knew much about Dreamachine until it was about to open to the public. Including us and the venues hosting it.

Dreamachine at Woolwich Works

We launched Woolwich Works' Spektrix-integrated website in April 2021, having worked closely with the Woolwich Works team, including Ticketing & Digital Manager, Hatti Simpson.

And it was Hatti who came to us a few months ago, with the challenge of setting up ticketing for Dreamachine. With a lead-time of just 2 weeks!

Because Dreamachine has multiple bookable sessions every day*, there are hundreds of bookable sessions all together. So, the regular list-view of dates and times we have on the website wasn’t going to work.

*We refer to this as ‘timed entry’ – for example, you might have a bookable session every half hour, every day, for many weeks. This is very different in terms of technical set-up from, say, a concert or a play which may have a couple of showings a day for a few weeks.

Our approach

We had to work quickly, but also remain flexible because new information about the ticketing set-up was emerging throughout that 2-week build period.


First, we specified an MVP (minimal viable product) – working out what we absolutely needed to do, in order to ticket Dreamachine online. 


Then we asked ourselves – have we tackled this kind of challenge before? The answer was yes. We’d built timed entry functionality for Britten Pears Arts (BPA), who offer multiple time slots daily for visitors to the Red House. So, we went through what we’d learned and built for BPA to work out if there was anything relating to timed entry that we could carry over into this project.


Now armed with as much information as possible, we started building.


Technical background

The Woolwich Works website is set up to use ‘event attributes’ in Spektrix to group events together.

Event attributes are additional data fields that allow the team to set up an event, and specify how it'll be managed once it’s imported into the website. For timed entry, where it's not practical to create an event with many hundreds of instances in Spektrix, the team can create multiple events and add the same value to them in the event attribute field. So, when the events are imported into the website we treat them as a single event – turning many events into one, and pulling all those instances together.

So, on the website, users are presented with a Calendar view. Once they select a date, the website makes a 'call' to Spektrix which goes through all the dates and times available – across the group of events – to find and display a list of all the bookable sessions for that selected date.


Challenges

We realised that the setup we had for Britten Pears Arts couldn’t be re-used; it wasn’t very flexible, having been built with the needs of the Red House in mind. But we could reuse some of the logic we’d applied to that earlier project, and this helped speed up the build for Woolwich Works.

Sometimes, when there’s a tight turnaround, we have to focus on delivering something workable rather than something future-proofed for all scenarios. We hit the deadline and went on sale. But … as soon as tickets were released, the Calendar view of dates and times broke. This was because the website couldn’t handle making all those calls to Spektrix when under heavy load.


Thankfully, by quickly identifying the problem and implementing a solution (improving the caching set-up), we had everything fixed within just 10 minutes.

Having breathed a sigh of relief once the system was running as is it should, and tickets were flying out of the door, we heard from our friends at Edinburgh International Festival …

Dreamachine at Edinburgh International Festival

The team let us know that Dreamachine would be heading to Edinburgh in August.

It was another tight turnaround. But this time – with our combined knowledge of timed entry from Britten Pears Arts, and having just successfully built Dreamachine ticketing for Woolwich Works – we were all set to create a robust solution.

Working with Leon Gray (Head of Ticketing and CRM) and Sandra MacKenzie (Digital & Campaigns Manager), we decided to scrap the use of event attributes in Spektrix. In EIF’s Spektrix system, each type of Dreamachine experience is set up as a single event with loads of instances, rather than multiple events that needed grouping together.

The interface we’d built for Britten Pears Arts, then repurposed for Woolwich Works, was working really well for users, so we re-used as much of that as possible for EIF’s Dreamachine set up.

Even better – with so much more knowledge about timed entry and all its nuances, we were able to build this nifty functionality directly into EIF’s existing event set up.

So, the team now has the option to apply ‘timed entry’ to any event in future.

In summary

At Supercool, we’re always keen to try new things and experiment. But sometimes time or budget restrictions mean we need to deliver a feature quickly and at a low cost. 
And things can go wrong. But anticipating this possibility makes it much easier to find and fix any issues – quickly.

Having built more than 20 Spektrix-integrated websites, we've learned that sharing learnings and processes between clients helps us to turn-around new Spektrix features quickly – even when under pressure
. We hope that by sharing these learnings, we'll encourage others to share their experiences too.

That way, we can all continue to offer better and better digital experiences to arts and cultural organisations – and your audiences.