Nitty gritty

Restricted broadcast rights prevented us from using any performance footage, so we had to find another way in.  Cue a custom photography rig and a 1.3 gigapixel photograph of 70,000 people at the Pyramid Stage on the second day of the festival.

After the event, the photo was made available on a Flash-based site where people could zoom into the crowd and tag themselves using Facebook Connect. This familiar functionality ensured low barriers to entry and took photo tagging to a scale never before achieved.

Users had multiple incentives to participate: to brag and reminisce, but also to connect with people they met at the festival. Integration with Facebook made every interaction visible across hundreds of Facebook news feeds, where the GlastoTag experience could weave naturally into existing Glastonbury chatter.

As a cheeky extra, we created a game called Where’s Welly, in which people had to locate a lone Orange boot in the chaos of the crowd. The winner got tickets to the festival. All good fun.

Highlights

• Getting choppered into a music festival and then looking out at a 70,000 strong crowd.
  
• Managing to pull off what turned out to be a frighteningly ambitious technical challenge.
  
• Helping Orange to substantiate its claim that it brings people together by really giving festival fans a unique social experience.
  
• Getting a certificate from the Guinness Book of Records after smashing the record for most tagged photograph.
  
• Being featured on the Boston Big Picture blog.
  
• Reading Contagious describe Glastotag as an example of the “golden age of the industry.”