Groundswell Events
Groundswell Events runs Singapore's open-air cinemas, Sunset Cinema and Films at the Fort, and sells a season of tickets in a few weeks. We have built and run its websites since 2014, from the first event site to QR-coded tickets and tiered pricing.
Groundswell Events sells every Sunset Cinema and Films at the Fort ticket through WooCommerce sites we built and relaunch each season, with QR-coded PDF tickets scanned at the gate.
What we were solving
Groundswell Events creates and runs large public events in Singapore. Its best-known brands are Sunset Cinema, an open-air cinema on Tanjong Beach at Sentosa, and Films at the Fort in Fort Canning Park. Before those came the Green Corridor Run along Singapore's old railway line.
Each event is seasonal. The website sits idle for most of the year, then takes a season's worth of ticket sales in a few weeks, with a spike the morning the mailing list goes out. The founder runs the business with a small team. He needs a site he can update himself, ticketing that holds up on launch day, and a developer who picks up the phone mid-season.
When we met Groundswell in 2014, the Green Corridor Run site was an older build, written for old versions of Internet Explorer and not responsive. Films at the Fort had no website. Tickets ran through third parties, and customers wanted to pay on the event's own site.
How we tackled it
The Green Corridor Run, rebuilt to be edited (2014)
The run came first. We rebuilt the site on a responsive child theme on the Genesis framework, designed around the client's photography and video. Beaver Builder gave the Groundswell team control of their own content, so the yearly updates (new date, new sponsors, new route) no longer needed a developer.
Films at the Fort gets its own ticketing
Films at the Fort was built for the event's first season. The logo already existed, so design moved quickly and the site launched on time. In the following seasons we added WooCommerce and built the ticket itself: a PDF with an embedded QR code, emailed on purchase and scanned at the gate. That removed paper tickets and the queue they created.
Sunset Cinema on the same engine, relaunched every season
When Groundswell launched Sunset Cinema, we kept the ticketing infrastructure and designed a new site on top of it to match the beach. Every year both sites are duplicated to staging, updated with the new programme, photography and sponsor, tested and pushed live the morning tickets go on sale.
The 2026 season was the largest rebuild since the original, briefed in late January with sales set for early February. The homepage video gave way to photography because it loaded slowly. The client's mock-up used six fonts, two with no web licence, so we proposed Google Fonts equivalents and cut the set to three. The bigger change was ticketing. The old flow sold one product per film. The 2026 season introduced Standard, Premium and Early Bird tiers with separate stock, so we rewrote the ticket logic for WooCommerce variable products, restructured the PDF per film and tier, and added a cart. When Early Bird sold out, the site moved to standard pricing on its own.
Be there on the days that matter
Ticket launch day for Sunset Cinema 2025 produced a spike the moment the mailing list went out. The site had a short downtime and was back within minutes, with our team on the line throughout. In April 2025 confirmation emails stopped mid-season. A security plugin was regenerating a key the SMTP plugin depended on. We fixed it that afternoon. When Groundswell paused the 2026 season shortly after tickets went on sale, the site was switched to mailing-list sign-up before the announcement the next morning. The ticketing engine stayed intact underneath.
What we delivered
Groundswell Events now owns its ticketing. Every Sunset Cinema and Films at the Fort ticket is sold on the event's own WordPress site, paid through Stripe, delivered as a QR-coded PDF and scanned at the gate. The sites run on the client's own WP Engine account, managed by Chillybin. The client adds films, edits prices and controls stock without a developer.
Films at the Fort ran its 2025 season in August and September on the site we relaunched that July. Both sites now collect mailing-list sign-ups, and the 2026 ticketing rebuild carries into the next season.
What we learned
Seasonal event sites are a different kind of client. For eleven months the site is a brochure. For one morning a year it is a shop under load, and every ticket not sold in that window is gone. The work that matters is the staging duplicate, the QA pass and being awake when the mailing list goes out.
Shared infrastructure pays off when a client runs more than one brand. The two cinemas look nothing alike but run the same ticketing engine. A fix lands on both, and the client learns one admin.
Impact & outcomes
as Groundswell's web developer
