Standout features:
- Arcade-inspired colors
- Gamified navigation
- Smooth transitions
The Netherlands’ Cinekid Festival is the largest children's media festival in the world. Children aged three to 14 years can watch new, unusual, striking film and television productions and meet the creators.
As on-site film festivals came to a screeching stop when the pandemic hit the world, the organization worked with Next Empire to conceptualize, design and build an online content platform. The website gamifies content exploration while traveling a metaphorical space where every “planet” has a specific theme and holds a rich collection of carefully curated content.
It presents a playful surrounding where children can “fly” through and explore the content they’re interested in. Gathering trophies, finding space wreckages, or seeing other kids’ avatars whizzing by is a masterfully crafted galaxy soundscape that takes after triple-A titles like No Man’s Sky, all neatly packed in an online browser.
What many online learning platforms and even educational games aimed at younger demographics fail to understand is that children demand freedom. When that is denied, they turn to passive entertainment. As Next Empire would put it:
“We live in times of extreme polarization and the so-called “fabeltjes fuik” (the self-fulfilling wormhole of narrowing content) that happens on social media and is something that needs to be countered. On the other hand, there are the Disneys and Netflixes around the world that offer very little context and shallow gratification […] We designed a world of content where parents can be at ease that the wormhole is not a sinkhole and where all content is of the highest quality.”
The website is, in fact, an invitation to play and learn together. Its careful and well-thought-out selection of content (films, workshops, interactives, and Q&As) with discovery is at its core will propel Cinekid Play to reach not only the whole of the Netherlands but the rest of the world.
-preview.jpg)
