PAI PAN GATHERING 2024

What started out as an idea over a cactus with my mate craig turned into one of the most challenging, motivating and levelling experience of my life.

In this write up I will cover the idea, the branding identity, the challenges and aspects to creating a festival style event.

After Movie.

I had the realisation that a festival is just an idea that exists online.

Initially its all about brand image and making people believe it will be a unique experience that’s worth traveling to.. and from that realisation I set out and worked over the next 4 months to make it into reality.

Added into the realisation was a culmination of several other factors:

“Why a handpan festival?” You’re probably not asking yourself. Well, last year I attended a 2 Day Handpan gathering in Chiang Dao called Pan Siam ran by MUTA (Thailand’s national Handpan makers). I was suddenly exposed to a beautiful community of peaceful South East Asians connecting over a shared niche interest. This festival had been held for around 6 years and became a reputable gathering and a important event for Thai and Asian Handpan artists.

I heard later in the year that MUTA had decided not to host it again this year, likely due to them wanting to focus on making Handpans and to avoid the stress of running a festival.

ANND on top of all of that sporadically throughout the year people kept telling me PAI needs a Handpan festival. It’s really the perfect place for it, a travellers destination filled with Artists and musicians and also acting as a platform to showcase said talent in PAI. I would agree with them.

Then Finally it is the relationship I have with Dreamscape. Likely one of the most unique, safe and immersive performance spaces in Asia. Along with Neil the owner who is somebody who encourages ideas, builds for the community and most importantly a friend.

It was this mix of elements and my ability to create engaging content that the penny dropped at that moment in time with Craig.

BRAND GUIDELINES.

I wanted the brand to reflect a Asian style with a modern twist with calming blues for restricted colour pallet.

I used Adobe Color to search for a colour pallet.

With brush stroke elements like the Heading font and the brush stroke title boxes along with the cloud pattern, this in combination felt very cohesive and reflected the theme well.

This pattern acted as the driving force for the brand. It was originally a black and white cloud collection image that I extended and added blue brand colour.

I think its a strong identity for a brand to be recognisable by a pattern. You can apply it in many creative ways more so than just a logo as it gives more of a feeling or a vibe.

I used this throughout some of the animation & marketing campaigns to keep a bit of brand consistency for the social content.

Handp(an)imation

I often joked to people that the festival was just a front for me to push my art and animations out there. While that was partly true.. it did serve as an amazing theme and medium to draw inspiration from.

It served as a proof of how engaging animation marketing can be.. With sometimes 3 times better Cost per Click average then static images or live action footage.

THE LINEUP.

YOGETSU AKASAKA (Japan)

KOJI MATUSOMOTO (Japan)

CHOR LAI (Hong Kong)

60 SECONDS BEFORE SLEEP (Thailand)

CLARA SOPHIA & YUVAL BABAYOFF (Germany & Israel)

OMER GOLO (Israel)

PIA & GARDEN (South Korea)

NATASHA SANDIAMO (Russia)

LU LU GOLDEN & NINE (China & Thailand)

TOR CHINNAWAT (Thailand)

TALTUL (Israel)

VBRTNS (Germany)

JAI RAM (Australia)

The lineup was a mix of performers from the previous Pan Siam festival and some Pai local artists. Having a mix was important as I wanted to attract the Thai & Asian handpan community through the high profile performers following and outreach. Then for the Pai community, a platform for resident artists to share and reach a different audience. This was also beneficial as I didn’t have to cover flights and accommodation for the Pai Artists.

It has been an amazing experience to connect and form relationships with these amazing & humble artists during the festival process.

NOTHING IS CREATED IN ISOLATION.

I’m the first one to admit I’m not a festival organiser, I had hoped through building this I was able to build momentum and connect with other Pai residents who had experiences in creating events and more specifically, festivals. I had connected with JJ and Nina, two very switched on individuals, with JJ having experience running events and Nina being very business minded and able to think about the things I often overlooked. Felt like a good team :)

The girls took care of the spreadsheets adding a lot of the logistical data for the Marketing Strategy, Festival Schedule, Performer data and so on. This acted as a central document for all of us to refer to throughout the process.

Printables

I had a lot of fun creating the various types of printable marketing material. We had A3 posters, A5 Flyers, two different festival wristbands, three different stickers, large scale vinyl prints and banners. Felt like a school project at times..

Website used: https://www.gogoprint.co.th/en/

VInyl Printing: Shop in Chiang Mai

Festival wristband: icy@aidemed.com

PROMO PARTY.

In order to grow the social media channels and show of the venue space and expectation of the festival experience, we held a promotional party at Dreamscape (around 2 months before the event) to capture video footage of the vibe and atmosphere to try sell the space. As currently the online presence was just a lot of pretty blue pictures without much tangible videos of photos of the venue.

Short form video content is the way our minds have now been conditioned to enjoy (Thanks Zuckerberg.)

So I kept the videos to around 5-8 seconds with several clips edited into it. I filmed this using my Fujifilm X-T5 and edited in After effects using the sticker stop motion element as an outro. I created around 8 videos from this promo party.

The party felt good! It was the first real experience that we were creating something. Seeing all these handpans in the space I could get a taste of what the event could be like.

Giveaway Marketing

We created a social marketing campaign to incentivise sharing and tagging for a chance to win 3 tickets to the festival. This helped to increase our followers on Facebook and Instagram and also spread awareness of the festival.

The participant had to like the post, tag two friends in the comment and follow the instagram or facebook account and share the video to their story. This helped to create a domino affect of their friends also tagging, following and liking..

DOME Content.

Part of my ambition for the festival was to create custom Handpan branded content for the inside of the Dome at Dreamscape. The Dome is a 100+ capacity geodesic dome with programable LED lighting along the inside of the support beams and full 360° projection mapping on the interior walls creating an incredible immersive visual environment, like a budget Las Vegas Sphere in remote Northern Thailand.

The content previously used in the Dome had been Ai generated and 360 content found online so to make something that was event specific, I felt really added to the value of the experience for attendees.

My idea was to create content that would interact with the structure of the Dome through Physics simulations and creating immersive environments that could be manipulated using Resolume and Mad Mapper VJ software by Den Chai, Dreamscapes in house fellow visual wizard.

In order to create physically interacting animations for the Dome I needed to model the interior shape of the room so 3D objects have geometry to collide with. I used Polycam to photoscan the interior and then recreated the support beams and walls in 3D using the scan as reference.