Our Clients: Vancouver Moving Theatre

The Heart of the City Festival, produced by Vancouver Moving Theatre (VMT), is a 12-day celebration of arts and culture in Vancouver, BC’s Downtown Eastside, showcasing the work of more than 50 community partners. Behind the scenes of this major annual event, in its 22nd year as of 2025, is a complex challenge: organizing programming, production, operations, and communications for more than 100 events. Fortunately, they’ve had Oak Bay Softrends by their side since 2017.

At the core of the festival’s workflow is a custom FileMaker Pro database, originally cobbled together by multiple teams—what Teresa Vandertuin, Festival Associate Artistic Producer (2005-2023), described as “put together by twist ties.” But with Oak Bay’s expertise, the festival has transformed its database into a powerful, flexible backbone that supports everything from artist scheduling and tech requirements to venue logistics and information dissemination. Each of the individual events has artists involved with different technical requirements.  The programmers put everything into FileMake and different managers—from production to promotions—use that info to do their jobs. Even the event’s 55-page guide is generated using the FileMaker database.

“Before FileMaker, we were using a piece of cardboard and yellow stickies,” says Teresa. “Now it’s a deeply integrated system. We only enter information once, and it flows across production, operations, and programming.”

That integration became essential during the pandemic. The festival had to pivot quickly to online and on-demand programming. With Oak Bay’s help, the database expanded to include connections to Eventbrite, Google Sheets, Zoom, and new layout modules that supported the transition. The learning curve was steep, but the system allowed VMT to maintain momentum without having to start from scratch.

Oak Bay developer Steven Cooper (Scoop) worked closely with the VMT team to continuously adapt the system to their evolving needs. “It’s a joy working with Scoop,” says Teresa. “We’d bring him an idea and he’d make it happen. He took the time to listen at the beginning, to understand our work—and that made all the difference.”

While some limitations persist (including the need for a major FileMaker upgrade), the system today is robust, collaborative, and critical to the festival’s long-term sustainability. It not only supports current operations—it’s preserving the institutional knowledge needed to carry the festival into its next decade and beyond.

When asked for advice on undertaking such a complex project with Oak Bay, Teresa said, “Have a good time! It really … computers can be so draining, so make sure to keep being human. That’s why Oak Bay has been so good to work with, they are not just computer folks, they are people.