Bruichladdich Distillery · Festival microsite · Live broadcast
Digital experience for Bruichladdich Distillery's Rock'ndaal at Fèis Ìle
Designing and producing the standalone Rock’ndaal festival microsite, integrating ticketing, merchandise and festival release sales with a live multi-camera broadcast, creating a seamless digital experience streamed to approximately 3,000 viewers each year.
01 / The Festival
Bruichladdich’s day at Fèis Ìle, scaled up over eight years.
Rock’ndaal is Bruichladdich’s day at Fèis Ìle, the Islay Festival of Malt and Music. Over eight years I watched it grow from a single festival-release bottle and an open day into a full programme, with a run of festival bottlings, a ticketed masterclass and a live music night on the distillery site.
Each year the festival was rebuilt around a freshly staged identity. The commerce and content had to carry that reinvention while staying recognisably Rock’ndaal, so returning visitors felt the continuity and newcomers met a complete world.
02 / The Platform
A Shopify Plus property rebuilt around a new festival identity each year.
The festival site is a Shopify Plus property. Rather than rebuild it from scratch each year, I designed it as a single visual onion skin that could be reskinned to the new identity annually, with the structure, ticketing and product templates staying constant underneath.
That let a small team turn the festival around quickly. The artwork, palette and motion changed; the commerce architecture did not, so each edition shipped as a content and styling task rather than a fresh build.
03 / The Broadcast
A wireless four-camera iOS rig streaming a 180-cap warehouse tasting to 3,000 viewers.
The pre-festival masterclass tasting ran in a working warehouse with a capacity of roughly 180, set by the space itself. To open it to a wider audience, the masterclass was broadcast live on YouTube each year and pulled in around 3,000 additional viewers per stream.
The capture rig was deliberately minimal. Four wireless iPhones on gimbals provided the camera feeds, with an iPad Pro running Switcher Studio as the vision mixer and streaming encoder.
The whole setup was iOS, which kept it portable, quick to rig in a working warehouse with no broadcast infrastructure, and viable on the budget of a single-day event. Operators could move freely between the presenters and the tasting line without cable runs.
A login wall on the broadcast page tied stream access to the customer account, which kept the audience inside the same identity the storefront and merchandise sat behind.
04 / The Map
An interactive 3D map of the distillery footprint, embedded in the site.
Getting around the distillery on a busy festival day is half the experience. I had a custom interactive 3D map of the distillery footprint built and embedded it in the site, so visitors could orient themselves before they arrived and on the day itself.
It gave everyone a single shared reference for where the masterclass, the bottle shop and the main stage actually were, doing the work a printed site map used to do but live in the browser.
05 / The Stage
Live visuals mixed on stage, feeding the outdoor LED wall.
The music night closed the festival on the distillery site. I mixed live visuals on stage in real time, feeding the large outdoor LED wall behind the performers so the screen responded to the night rather than looping a fixed reel.
It tied the digital identity of the festival back into the physical event, the same visual language running from the website through to the wall above the crowd.
06 / Reflection
What eight years on the same brief actually changes.
Eight years on one brief teaches you what is worth keeping. The festival identity changed every year, but the things that made it work, fast ticketing, a clear masterclass and a reason to come back, stayed constant. The reinvention was on the surface; the structure underneath earned its stability.
It also showed how far a small team can take an annual event when the platform is built to be reskinned rather than rebuilt. The brief kept evolving, but each edition started from a known, dependable base, which is what let the creative part stay ambitious.