One of my longtime clients approached me mid-November with a very specific idea. Hanna Bachmann, an immensely talented pianist, just had to cancel all her performances for November and December again due to the ongoing Coronavirus situation.

To still give her listeners the opportunity to experience classical piano music, Hanna and I devised a plan: We could bring music to everyone's home with a digital advent calendar.

The calendar would consist of 24 'windows' that would unlock one by one on each day of advent, and users could then access a video of Hanna playing a classical in the comfort of her living room.
Some of the calendar windows

While we quickly progressed through the planning stages of this project, it became obvious that it proved to be quite a challenge:

  1. There were only 2 weeks left til December 1st, so the calendar had to be up and running as soon as possible.
  2. The possibility to buy the calendar had to be implemented even sooner, of course, given that what we offered was an advent calendar - something most people would buy before December 1st.
  3. Hanna's site had no payment infrastructure to begin with, and we wanted to offer as many payment options as possible to make onboarding a breeze.
  4. We were not supposed to ever meet in person due to Corona-Virus restrictions and given that she was living in Vienna. That made the whole project a remote collaboration
  5. Hanna had the means to record the videos, but not to edit them.

However, even though there was a lot on the table, we managed to launch the promotional site and the payment system after merely a few days, delivered the calendar on time and the project has been a great success.

Tasks included & skills acquired:

  • Another deepdive into wordpress. Themes, payments, multilanguage, plugins
  • Quickly designing the calendar using Bootstrap, fullpage.js and custom layouts and styles. Using Hanna's color scheme. Could certainly use optimisation, but serviceable given the very short development time.
  • Implementing payments via Stripe and Paypal.
  • Restricting content to paying customers only
  • Design using Affinity Designer, Affinity Photo
  • Video Editing with DaVinci Resolve
  • Optimizing music recordings via Audacity

Try it out at:

https://www.hannabachmann.com/en/christmas-calendar