Case Study: Seattle AI Film Festival Website
The Seattle AI Film Festival website serves not just as a document of the festival itself, but as a record of the early stages of generative AI filmmaking at this historic moment in time.
The inaugural Seattle AI Film Festival held in March of 2025 was a groundbreaking event allowing creatives from around the world to showcase cutting-edge films made using artificial intelligence.
Films from eighty five filmmakers from 22 countries were screened during the two-day festival, which was held at the City of Seattle’s M5 Creator’s Hub.
The festival was produced by Culture & Code, a podcast and AI automation company dedicated to helping storytellers collaborate better with AI and each other.
John Gauntt, the founder of Culture & Code and the Creative Director of the Seattle AI Film Festival, put on the event because he believes that artificial intelligence is much more than a way to make the creative process more efficient.
“The future of stories and the creative process are inextricably intertwined with technology, not as a replacement for traditional forms, but as an evolution of the tools we use to express ourselves,” he said.
Gauntt and Culture & Code are no strangers to MediaStorm.
Our companies have collaborated on multiple projects in the past, including the visual implementation of the podcast Burner Face, which was produced using the MediaStorm Platform.
Gauntt and Culture & Code’s Keith Ancker, who served as Technical Director of the Seattle AI Film Festival, have both attended MediaStorm’s One-Day and Methodology Master Classes and are well steeped in MediaStorm’s storytelling and packaging approach.
The pair reached out in January to commission MediaStorm to build a website for the inaugural festival.
The first step was to solidify the site’s mission and to begin to conceptualize how to visualize the site structure.
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The Goals
The team quickly identified that the website had two distinct goals, and that in order to meet them, site development must be divided into two phases.
In phase 1, prior to the festival, the website would serve as advance promotion, with primary information about the event and the staff, as well as ways to submit a film, become a sponsor and buy tickets.
In phase 2, after the festival, it would showcase all of the films that were selected to be screened, identify the winners, and provide biographical profiles for each of the filmmakers.
The Challenge
In talking through the schedule, the team realized that there would be very little time between when we received material for each phase and when it would need to be published.
The initial material about the 83 festival films would come just days before the event, and we would need to have a structure ready to move quickly.
The films themselves couldn’t be published, however, as that would upstage the live festival screenings.
We would only be able to publish the films once the festival was over, and aspired to do so quickly.
We would have the ability to employ the Platform’s visual interactives to provide a sophisticated presentation for the full films as they came in.
The Implementation
We built a single website release in the MediaStorm platform that would serve as the foundation for the promotional phase before the event.
We used the Platform’s Page and Contributor Titles to communicate information about the festival.
We chose a website release so we could employ the Platform’s custom navigation feature, which would allow for us to link to internal pages, as well as linking to outside sites with others.
Navigation to links such as Schedule, Sponsorship, Press and About linked to internal pages, while others such as Podcast, Newsletter and Submit a Film, linked to third-party solutions.
The Website Release also allowed us to add the organizer’s logo at the top right with a branded “A Production of Culture & Code” link.
As with all of our Releases, the Seattle AI FIlm Festival site can be embedded on any other website.
All users need to do is click the share button at the bottom right and embed code will appear. The code can be pasted into a custom code block on another site and the Release will display in full.
Phase 1 - Information and Promotion
Information about the festival
The goal of this stage was to promote the festival and provide information about the films that were selected to be screened.
Another goal was to present the benefits for potential sponsors.
We built an image grid containing the logos of the festival’s sponsors and partners, each with a link back to that organization’s website. As new sponsors came in, we were able to quickly add them to the grid, which was displayed on the Sponsor page.
Another important feature was the ability of organizers to be able post news about the festival on the website.
For that, we built a blog-style Press page that was linked from the top-level navigation.
The page contains excerpts, each which link to a fully displayed web press release, and a link to download a PDF version.
These pages were critical to communicate to industry insiders, some of whom became advisors or judges in the festival.
To display their involvement and bios we built an About page that lists festival staff and advisors.
Organizers wanted to provide a list of screenings to take place during the festival, so we built a detailed Schedule page.
This page contained screening times for each film, as well as links to bio information about each director, and the category the film was entered into.
This page allowed attendees to learn about each film as they were being screened in a tight deadline during the course of the festival.
Information about the films
To build the foundation of the film library, which included more than 80 films, we relied heavily on the Group Content Block functionality.
We created Page Titles that matched the film categories of the festival. Each of these category pages consisted of multiple films.
We created Group Blocks for each film, so they can be easily identified and rearranged as a group if necessary.
Each of the blocks consisted of material related to that film, specifically the film’s title, a poster frame, the film’s description, and a link to the director’s bio profile.
The dynamic text and media blocks pointed at the data in the media asset, allowing us to make changes to those records and have it reflect everywhere it was used on the site.
To create the filmmakers’ bio profiles, we relied on the Platform’s Contributors functionality.
Each director was entered into the backend as a unique contributor, allowing us a centralized way to leverage their bios from multiple places.
Each contributor record allowed us to add a profile image and a bio description independently for each.
Our plan was to add each director’s film to their profile after the live festival.
By combining Pages that were organized into film-specific content groups in Phase 1, we were able to create templates that could be replicated over the course of each of the 83 films.
These blocks consisted of information about the film, along with a poster frame image, and a link to the contributor’s bio.
Each film credit contained a link to the filmmaker’s full bio, so users could learn more about the directors.
All of the filmmaker bios were added to a Contributor’s Title, allowing us to display them as a group so that users could browse All Filmmakers.
As a bonus, the All Filmmakers view was displayed on an interactive screen at the festival event, allowing festival-goers to scroll through the directors.
And finally, at the bottom of the homepage, we used a Filmstrip Cover to allow users to browse trailers from a selection of the festival films, using a horizontal scrolling navigation common on streaming services.
This gave users something to watch until the festival event had concluded and we were able to move on to the second phase of the site.
Phase 2 - Film and Event Showcase
Once the festival was over, we were able to add the films to each of the category pages.
This consisted of two parts, updating the existing site and adding new, visually sophisticated interactive elements.
Updating the existing site
We simply opened each group and changed the source the dynamic text and media items were pointing to from the still image poster frames to the films.
We did this for each of the films, flowing them into the category pages that we had built in Phase 1 that just contained poster frames.
This transformed the pages from simply informational into a library of all the festival films broken down by category.
We added each of the full films to the director’s bio pages, so all the work on the site could be browsed by filmmakers as well.
Adding Interactives
Once the site was updated with all the films, we set about creating visual interfaces so users could navigate the films in a sophisticated way.
We added each of the winning films to a playlist so that viewers could watch them sequentially that is organized by category.
For the homepage, we added a Grid Cover as a visual entryway to the Winners playlist.
We also created a much larger playlist containing all the films from the festival.
This allows users to open a single film and after watching it, the next one will play, providing a continuous play experience for viewers. Details for each film can be found by clicking the menu in the bottom left corner.
Submissions to the festival were received from 22 countries.
We built a map that allowed users to navigate directors and their films based on location.
Each point on the map opened a list of filmmakers from that country. Clicking on the filmmaker’s name opened their contributor bio that included their selected film..
Each of these interactives is displayed on the homepage, allowing users to quickly find films they are looking for.
In addition, they appear in the custom nav that is part of our Website Release, so users can navigate to them via drop down menus if they prefer.
The Results
After phase 1 of the Seattle AI FIlm Festival was launched, filmmakers from 22 countries submitted films to the festival.
Many of the 83 films selected to be screened were submitted through the prominent links on the site’s homepage and top level navigation.
The festival’s organizers were able to provide news about the festival through press releases directly on the site.
They were also able to offer the festival’s sponsors and partners prominent logo placement.
The dynamic site allowed our client to showcase the breadth of the festival by publishing each film in full, along with biographical profiles of each contributor.
Our unique implementation of the filmmaker bios allowed the festival organizers to display them on an interactive screen at the event.
The filmmakers themselves particularly appreciated this feature, along with the thorough way the films were presented.
“Your site, and cataloging of the directors and films, is really a cut above the rest. Really can see the work you have put into this. BRAVO!!,” one filmmaker wrote. “Will def be shouting out how "SAIFF is a role model for other festivals.”
Gauntt and Ancker received other feedback as well, and thoughts of their own about the site approach uniquely supported their efforts.
About The Client
The Seattle AI Film Festival is a two-day event that showcases films created using generative artificial intelligence. The inaugural event was held in March 2025.
The festival was produced by Culture & Code, a podcast and AI automation company dedicated to helping storytellers collaborate better with AI and each other.
Culture & Code’s principal staff members John Gauntt and Keith Ancker, also partner in the podcast company Augmented City.
One of Augmented City’s projects is the futuristic podcast Burner Face.
Burner Face’s website was also built using the MediaStorm Platform.
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