This article looks at the recently released toolkit for Consensus Gentium, an interactive film by artist Karen Palmer, which toured to 11 shopping centres across England in 2024. The toolkit outlines considerations for planning a tour of broader screen content across the UK, focusing on advice concerning targeting audiences, marketing and outreach, audience expectations for immersive experiences, and location-based immersive media exhibition.
The full 18-page report can be read here, but here are some specific areas of focus for Film Hub Members:
The core of the report is a deep dive into audience outreach, engagement, and feedback. Nearly all attendees were walk-ups, with traditional marketing like flyering and social media ads having little to no impact. Even with this, they reached their target demographics, with 70% of visitors in the 14 to 24 age group, and over 40% from global majority backgrounds, and 50% saying that they didn’t normally visit cultural venues. They achieved this by:
- Exhibiting in high-traffic, familiar locations for these audiences, such as shopping centres
- Tailoring the content and tone for younger audiences, with brevity and simplicity built into the experience
- Including more moments for interactivity to keep engagement high
- Using themes relevant to everyday life to hold audience's attention
The tour largely took place in underserved towns and cities in the Midlands and North of England, prioritising places with low cultural engagement and strong community identities and finding exhibition success in satellite towns more often than city centres. This shows a viable model for getting digital storytelling into public spaces regardless of where in the country those spaces exist.
Community partnership is a major theme in the report. It consistently links success to stronger audience engagement where producers have local contacts. This could mean working with local groups, such as schools, colleges, youth centres, as well as trusted cultural figures or local influencers. The report emphasises hyper-localised messaging, working with representatives from your audience to co-create language and situational awareness to build trust.
While the report doesn’t provide full budget breakdowns, it outlines touring logistics and operational requirements in detail. The experience was funded by an Arts Council England Touring Grant, which helped to pay for a low-cost, high-impact design that was portable without hiring transit, easy to set up, and required only 3 or 4 staff to fully run. However, it emphasises the need for staff training in onboarding/offboarding, device handling, and audience interaction, and suggests investing in ways to adapt work for different users and their preferred ways of interacting with the experience, like having versions with different durations or amounts of interactivity.
In short, this is a wonderful case study of a broader screen experience that shows how you can successfully reach a wide audience by tailoring your exhibition to their location, preferences, and interests.