Before diving into how SparqFest supports live streaming for your festival, it's useful to know some basic information about live streaming. If you are an experienced live streamer, you can skip this article. Running a live stream works almost exactly the same as broadcasting a live television show. The key difference is that the “program” feed goes...

Yes, SparqFest has a judging module capable of supporting a number of different judging processes for both juried and audience choice awards. Configure awards in our judging module, define rules for calculating winners, and then invite in a jury to judge those awards. We also have an advanced laurel management system that makes nominee and winner la...

NOTE: This documentation is currently in progress. We are providing it as a preview for those developers who have expressed interest in getting an early start. SparqFest supports OAuth 2.0 for authorizing api requests. Your client will follow a standard OAuth 2.0 workflow to receive an access token from SparqFest. Each API request you make will, in ...

The most common reasons for not having access to content online are: The ticket purchased does not grant access to the desired content. You are limited in the number of times you can watch the content and you have exceeded that limit. You purchased the ticket with a different ID than the one you are currently logged in with. You transferred the tick...

Because the SparqFest API uses OAuth for authentication, you will first need to register you application and receive a client_id and client_secret. We are currently working on a developer portal that will manage this process. This process will allow any developer to register an application through the developer portal. Once registered, you can begin...

Yes. When you are uploading your video, select “Google Drive” for the “File Location” field. A button will appear for selecting the file from Google Drive. When you select the file, we will automatically transfer that file from Google Drive to the festival's storage. Prior to picking the file, you will be asked to sign in to Google and grant us perm...

No. If you are coming to SparqFest because you received an invitation, that invitation is not yet associated with any identity. You can login with any email address to claim an invitation sent to any email address....

Only you. Juror notes are stored in an encrypted format in the SparqFest database. They are never made available to anyone except you. These notes allow you to keep track of things you consider important as you review each nominee.  ...

The public web site will display the following dates and times in the user's local timezone: Festival start/end dates Start times for virtual screenings Start times for live streams Start/end times for in-person events are shown in the venue's timezone. If you are seeing the wrong start/end date for your festival on the public site, check the follow...

If you are using FilmFreeway, you can ignore import mappings. SparqFest pre-defines an import mapping for the standard FilmFreeway export. Create a custom import mapping if you: Run your submissions from your own spreadsheet Have an intermediate step between export from FilmFreeway and import to SparqFest and you add additional columns in that proce...

SparqFest venues exist independent of any specific edition so that they may be re-used from year-to-year. When you set up a venue in SparqFest, you can then create events that get associated with that venue. The event pages then provide access to the venue information, including a map and directions. SparqFest also creates special venue pages. The g...

Customization of the layout of your public site runs through SparqFest site themes. A site theme defines the layout of your public site and your general ability to control the look and feel through custom colors and fonts. Unless the theme documentation says otherwise, each theme will support all SparqFest functionality. The theme simply governs how...

Welcome to SparqFest! By now, you have likely signed up for your free trial or subscription to the SparqFest Festival Platform and are anxious to dive into making the site work for your festival. This series of "Initial Setup" documents will guide you through the full process of getting up and running with the SparqFest platform. For the most part, ...

Google and Apple have built tools to enable other applications (like SparqFest) to securely authenticate you without the need for those other applications to store sensitive data like passwords. In short, by relying on experienced identity providers like Google and Apple, SparqFest is creating a more secure environment. No one can steal your passwor...

Before you can begin programming a festival, you need to pull the list of your selections into SparqFest. Most of our festivals accept submissions in FilmFreeway, though a handful are either invitation-based or rely on their own internal tools to manage submissions. SparqFest is not itself a submissions platform. We assume you are accepting submissi...

If you have received an email notifying you that someone is transferring a ticket to you, you can claim the ticket in one of two ways: If you already have an account with the festival, the transfer happened automatically and you need do nothing. If you do not have an account with the festival, a claim code will be included in the email you received ...

The SparqFest jury voting system was created long before COVID-19 to help festival jury members collaborate over the internet to select winners of festival awards. It enables you to define awards of various types, configuring voting rules, nominate selections, invite in your jury, and then let the jury loose to their task. If you are not yet familia...

Not all festivals sell tickets or use SparqFest ticketing. If you do not see a “Ticketing” menu item, then one of the following is true: Tickets are not yet on sale. Tickets are not required for the festival. The festival is using a third-party ticketing system. If the festival you are attending is granting free, ticketless access to content, you wi...

If your festival has an audience choice competition, you can participate by watching/listening to selections and going to the audience choice voting page and voting. To be eligible to participate: You must have actually watched/listen to content You may place a vote only for a selection you have watched/listen to In addition, some festivals place a ...

NOTE: This documentation is currently in progress. We are providing it as a preview for those developers who have expressed interest in getting an early start. Access to resources in a SparqFest application is a combination of what resources the user is allowed to access and what access that user has granted to the client they are using. Even if a u...

If your festival has no concept of “members” or you want to keep your online sales simple, you can ignore SparqFest membership functionality. Memberships are simply a way of categorizing your audience that can be used in a variety of ways: SparqFest allows you to define different prices for the same product based on the user membership You can offer...

The SparqFest Dashboard is your “home page” in the Staff Portal. Prior to the April 2023 release (v2023.04.12.01), we had a very rudimentary dashboard with reporting spread throughout the Staff Portal. With this update, the dashboard has become a single location for checking in your festival's online operations, identifying critical actions that nee...

We create new public sites with the URL https://[yourfestival].sparqfest.live where [yourfestival] is the name or abbreviation for your festival. For most festivals, the SparqFest URL does not matter. They have a www site , drive all traffic to it, and simply link over to the online site. Audience members never see the SparqFest URL except in the ad...

Your public web site is available online to the entire world and often contains a mix of times for online events and in-person events as well as dates without times attached and full times. SparqFest manages all times so that they are presented in a format that makes the most sense for each specified audience member in the context in which they are ...

SparqFest supports the online sales of a variety of items common in the film festival world. While this functionality naturally supports online ticket sales, we also make it possible for you to sell other things via your SparqFest site and manage the pricing based on membership levels you define. Understand Your Tax Situation SparqFest has no suppor...

Character encoding issues typically occur for people managing submission information with titles in non-Latin alphabets in a spreadsheet and exporting to CSV for import into SparqFest. This problem arises from failing to export in UTF-8. Some versions of Excel and Numbers require you to specifically export your CSV as UTF-8. For more information on ...

Because of when we launched SparqFest as a solution (mid-2020), many people think of us as a solution for online festivals. We initially built the software, however, to run a purely (at that time) in-person festival: Minnesota WebFest. The software had three initial areas of focus: Get all the assets we need from filmmakers Help the jurors do their ...

Before your selection will appear on the public web site, the festival director must enable the display of this year's selections. They may be waiting for a certain number of selections to enter their data. If you have made a change and your selection is already on the site, your page will re-generate after a few minutes. Your browser, however, will...

Projects such as podcasts and original scores are naturally audio in nature. Because festival programming is visual in nature, our approach is to take these audio files and turn them into videos. This article describes the process for uploading audio content and what we do with that content once we receive it. Support for audio formats is currently ...

In short, no. The long answer is that there is no standard for the files that FilmFreeway accepts when you create your project. Some we can download, some we cannot. Some are screening quality, some are specifically for online viewing. Some are early cuts, some are final masters. Whatever the case for you video, there is no direct mechanism that ena...

Our optional Judging Module includes support for both audience choice (described elsewhere) and juried awards. For juried awards, you set up the different awards for your festival, define your voting rules, and invite in jury members to review the nominees and pick a winner. Maximum Secrecy Our entire jury process is designed so that only those who ...

SparqFest sends out a number of transactional emails to you, your staff, jurors, creators, and audience members. Depending on the type of message being sent and the context, you may have a significant level of control over how the email looks. Types of Emails We break emails down into four categories: Account emails Alerts Reports Emails on your beh...

The SparqFest Judging Module is an optional component that is currently included in your SparqFest subscription. If you are an inaugural customer, you will have access to this module as part of your subscription as long as your subscription is active without any extra charges. As the name implies, the Judging Module enables you to define award categ...

For some festivals, you have the ability to add a donation to your purchase when you checkout. This donation is entirely optional and can be for any amount of your choosing. Any amount you enter will be added to your total and charged to your credit card....

Content can come into your festival in any language: living, dead, historic, or constructed. If you have a fan fiction selection in a constructed language like Klingon or Sindarin, we can present that work (assuming Unicode support for the alphabet) just the same as we would a selection in French or in Chinese. When we present a page for a selection...

Now that you have access to the Creator Portal and see your project listed, it's time to familiarize yourself with the layout of the portal and the tasks you need to complete. The Miami WebFest Creator Portal for the Utopia Planitia team The Dashboard The initial screen once you get into the Creator Portal is the Creators Dashboard. It lists all pro...

Yes. It is a $250 one-time setup fee. By default, the URL for your festival is https://[yourfestival].sparqfest.live. That URL is typically “good-enough” if you are driving people to your www site and linking from SparqFest from there. If, on the other hand, you intend to give out the SparqFest link, then you probably want it branded with your own n...

We accept posters, logos, and other images in JPG, PNG, or WebP. If your original is not in WebP format, we convert it to WebP anyways....

When someone invites you to collaborate in SparqFest, you will receive an invitation with a 6 character invitation code if you don't already have an account with that festival. In most cases, you can simply click the “Accept Invitation” button in the email and that will guide you through the process of getting an account setup with SparqFest. You wi...

We support almost any common video codec and file format. The only format that we do not support is ProRes 4444. We do support all other ProRes formats, but ProRes 4444 is specifically a mastering format for post-production and not for delivery. YOU MUST INCLUDE AN AUDIO TRACK EVEN IF YOUR WORK HAS NO SOUND. Not including an audio track is almost al...

Note: the features in this article are new as of December 9, 2022. Our goal with this feature is to enable you to replace your www site. Please let us know if this functionality is falling short of that objective for your site needs. We will work to address those concerns in a future release. Out of the box, SparqFest will create a dynamic web site ...

If you have decided that SparqFest is not right for you, you need do nothing. Your account will be closed automatically once your trial is up if you have not entered your credit card information. Once you enter your credit card information, we will automatically charge your card upon the expiration of your trial for the amount of the subscription fo...

The location of the link to access the Creator Portal varies depending on the site theme for which your SparqFest site is configured. Typically, you will find it either in the page footer or in the profile menu after you login. If the link is at the bottom of the page and you are not logged in, the site will first prompt you to login and then redire...

We support deployment locations in France, the UK, Ireland, Canada, the United States, Brazil, Singapore, and Australia. If you signed up for SparqFest before our self-service sign-up was in place, we picked a location based on your data sovereignty and audience requirements. Those who sign-up using our self-service portal pick their own hosting loc...

Customization Effort: Minimal Profile: Any type of festival who wants to put the focus on the selections Cautions: Filmmakers with bad posters The Snowfall theme is all about your selections with minimal effort needed for customization. It serves in-person, online, and hybrid festivals equally well. The Snowfall home page Fonts The default sans-seri...

If the award you are judging is vote-based, you have two ways to make your selection: From the review dialog From the finalists tab for the award's award page Typically, when a judge is reviewing a finalist and that one is their “favorite up to this point”, they can simply select “Make this selection my choice” link at the bottom of the review dialo...

As noted in the article on Importing/Creating Submissions, SparqFest does not work with the submission data. It's simply there for getting things going. Everything in SparqFest operates on “selections” and the process of turning a submission into a selection is called “promotion”. The process of promoting a submission kicks off a number of workflows...

SparqFest supports both free and paid access to online and in-person events and content. Our ticketing module has a number of features that are discussed elsewhere. For the purposes of this initial setup article, we will cover a couple of key scenarios: Free access to online events Basic ticket sales for access to in-person and online events A new S...

SparqFest ticketing allows you to sell tickets online for both in-person and online events. One ticket may grant access to a specific event, or may cover the entire festival. Define Rich Entitlements You can define any number of tickets, each with different entitlements. The tickets you define can control access in any of the following ways: A singl...

Our Virtual Technical Director services raises SparqFest to be part of your staff, serving as your Technical Director. Serving remotely, SparqFest handles the technical aspects of your festival without the need for you to worry about anything other than select in-venue issues. As part of this service, we go beyond the common support concerns to offe...

Thank you for supporting your festival with your time and expertise. Your festival is using a tool called the Sparq Festival Platform (SparqFest) to manage the juried voting process. SparqFest enables you to focus your time on what matters instead of messing with spreadsheets or physical media. Your primary job as a juror is to review all finalists ...

Selections represent projects that have been selected into a festival. Any selection in the system becomes publicly visible once the edition has made selections public. Selections are the core item being programmed into virtual and in-person screenings. Endpoints GET programming/selection GET programming/selection/:id DELETE programming/selection/:i...

In the article “A Tour of the Creator Portal”, we briefly pointed out the “Film Extras” at the bottom of your selection panel. Because they are optional elements, we didn't dive into much detail there. This article gives a brief overview of the “Film Extras” functionality. Team Management The creation of your project was likely a collaborative effor...

Customization Effort: Minimal Profile: Online or using SparqFest only for the online events Cautions: None The Festflix theme provides a "streaming channel" experience to viewers and is thus a great theme for purely virtual festivals as well as festivals using SparqFest only for their online programming. It also works well for festivals emphasizing ...

At the top of the tickets page is a link that says “Enter Discount”. Click that link and an input field opens where you can enter the discount code. Your browser does not support HTML5 video. Type in your discount code and click “Apply”. If the code is valid, you will see the discount amount in your shopping cart display. If the code was not valid, ...

We have a number of support options to match the technical needs of our festival partners and stakeholders. Included with every subscription is our Basic Support offering. You are responsible for handling first-line support for any issues encountered by creators, judges, and your audience. If the issues are problems with the functioning of the web s...

Simply login with either your Google ID or your Apple ID. A new account will be created for you automatically. If you do not have a Google ID or Apple ID, you can create one for free. To login from a desktop, click the Login/Register button at the top of the page. To login from a mobile device, click the menu icon and select the Login/Register menu ...

When you first configure your festival, one of the configuration tabs is for “Marketing” and includes fields for entering a variety of social media handles. We also ask for social media handles for your selections and venues. None of this basic configuration is what we consider “social media integration”. We can't post to your accounts, follow users...

Your festival web site can be localized to one or more languages that SparqFest supports as well as except user-generated content in any language, including dead languages and constructed languages. We also do automatic machine translations any time you enter text content and give you the option of reviewing and altering those translations. Site Con...

Yes. Follow these instructions depending on your set-top device: Apple TV  Roku ...

Our sites are responsive and you can watch using your mobile browser. We do not yet have any mobile apps, but iOS and Android apps will be available in the near future....

The SparqFest is a RESTful API that uses standard HTTP methods and response codes and accepts JSON payloads while providing JSON responses. This API is currently in development, but you can use the documentation in this section to familiarize yourself with its core principles and architecture. We intend to roll out version 2 in March 2023 (version 1...

You have the ability to configure two different types of pre-rolls in SparqFest: one to run before every online screening block and, when configuring a screening block, one specific to that block. As the name suggests, these pre-rolls play to start out the block. First the global pre-roll (configured in “Settings” > “Editions”) will run if you ha...

When you import submissions into SparqFest, we need to associate each selection with at least one submission category. We do this by mapping the categories under which the submission was submitted into your submissions platform to SparqFest submission categories. In SparqFest parlance, we call our categories “submission categories” and those of the ...

SparqFest gives you four different portals: The public festival site The Staff Portal The Creator Portal The Jury Portal You can make the public web site your singular online presence, or you can simply link to it from your public web site for critical SparqFest functionality. What's on the Public Site? The public web site is designed both as an aud...

If you see a message from Dropbox saying that the application is not configured to work from your domain and your site has a custom domain, we need to add that to our configuration on your behalf....

When you sign-up for SparqFest, you sign up for an annual subscription based on the number of hours of programmed content in your festival. You may hold any number of events over the course of the year, but the content for those events go against a single annual bucket of programming hours. We don't have a lot of “add-on” charges. Extras include: A ...

v2024.01.01.01 - January 1, 2024 New features: We no longer automatically create submission categories when importing submissions: If the submission categories in a spreadsheet have no match in SparqFest, a warning is issued You should be setting up submission categories before your first import Submission categories may now define different screene...

If you have purchased tickets for others, you can transfer them by visiting your profile and selecting the ticket you wish to transfer. Review Your Tickets You review any tickets you have purchased on your profile page. You can access the profile page once you are logged in by selecting “Manage Your Profile” from the profile menu (the one with your ...

The SparqFest team has years of experience building secure cloud-based solutions. We provide encryption by delivering content as an HLS stream over HTTPS to clients. For the filmmakers and our clients, they have confidence that it cannot be intercepted by third-parties and cannot be downloaded. This is from 10+ years experience. Filmmaker exhibition...

You now have configured all of the generic information, appearance, and structure of your SparqFest web site. As noted in Components and Concepts, you configure both general information about the festival and information specific to the current edition of your festival. This article goes into configuring a specific edition. Step 1: Review the Basic ...

You need many different assets from creators in order to run your festival. A few examples include: Video files for both online and in-person screenings Logos and posters for the print program Trailers for online marketing and social media These assets are all over the place. Some of them are in FilmFreeway (but not in the right format or dimensions...

Over time, SparqFest can help you raise the profile of your festival in search engines through its smart search engine optimization (SEO). This article describes what we do from a search engine perspective and how you and you creators can take advantage of it. Our SEO is a Benefit to Your Creators It's easy to focus on the benefits of what SparqFest...

We have both direct download options and the ability to sync with cloud storage solutions like Dropbox and Google Drive. Cloud storage synchronization requires you to have a cloud storage account with sufficient storage....

Now that you have purchased tickets, it's time to make use of them by attending festival events online and in-person. In particular, there are three different ways of using the tickets you have purchased: Attending in-person Attending online through a browser Attending online through an app like the Apple TV and Roku apps Apple TV and Roku Are “Beta...

  In your Creator Portal, SparqFest will ask for a logo that will be marked optional. Though this logo is optional, it makes a huge visual impact when done right. Logo vs No Logo Below are two selection pages. One has a logo, the other does not: With a logo… …and without It's not that the second project looks bad, it's simply that the first project ...

Yes. Both you and your festival filmmakers and other creators have controls to manage geographic restrictions. Creators can set geographic restrictions that match their distribution constraints, and you can create specialized online screening blocks that have their own set of geographic restrictions. Restrictions may be defined at the continent, “su...

You can attend any virtual screenings and live streams from your own living room through the SparqFest app for Roku. The SparqFest App The SparqFest app is a single app that provides access to all participating festivals using the SparqFest platform. To be accessible via the SparqFest app, a festival must: Have online content Opt-in to appearing in ...

In places where we ask for a video asset, getting that asset into SparqFest is a two step process: upload and ingest. For your screeners/exhibition copies, this process can take a long time. You should be uploading a reasonably high quality video asset which is probably many gigabytes in size. This article lays out what we expect from a video file, ...

Once a festival imports their Official Selections from FilmFreeway or another platform, creators like you receive an invitation to complete information required by the festival in SparqFest. You likely received such an invitation. If you had a selection in a previous edition of this festival and it was using SparqFest at the time, you can login and ...

Yes. SparqFest has a robust system of ticket entitlements that enable you to configure a maximum number of online sales of tickets in addition to limiting online replays of individual works or entire blocks....

When you first register, we receive your name and email address from your identity provider of choice. If your identity provider is Apple, this email address may be a private address. If your identity provider is Google, we also receive your avatar/headshot. As you interact with a festival, we will also store: Any content you have watched Any conten...

You cannot rate nominees or place votes while an award is still in its “Nominating” phase. The “Nominating” phase is a period in which judges and nominees are still being assigned to an award. You will receive an email once the award enters the “Judging” phase. At that time, you can begin rating nominees and voting....

If you receive an error saying something like, "The dimensions of the image you uploaded were..." or "The aspect ratio (width/height) does not match our needs for this kind of image...", then you have uploaded an image that will not work for your festival. People see this error when they upload an image for a field that requires an image of a specif...

Yes. If you bought more than one ticket or if you do not intend to use your ticket, you can transfer your tickets from your profile page. Once logged into the festival site, go to “Manage Your Profile” under your profile menu (the one with your headshot or with a generic person icon). Near the bottom of the profile is a section called “Tickets”. Cli...

From a SparqFest perspective, an in-person event is any event that takes place at a physical venue and is attended by your festival attendees. Before COVID-19, most festivals were 100% in-person while talking a good game about how “someday in the future, they were going to incorporate online elements”. SparqFest in-person events let you highlight th...

In the article on Configuring a Live Stream , we covered how you set up a live stream inside the SparqFest platform. That, however, is only half the equation. The other half is pointing your live streaming source to your streaming platform so viewers can watch it. The details differ from tool-to-tool, but the basics are the same. You take the RTMP U...

The video player will skip any selection that is not allowed to be seen in your region. This will typically happen because a creator has a distribution agreement or premiere requirements that prevent them from showing their work to online viewers in your area.Any geographic restrictions will appear on the page for the block as well as the selection ...

You don't think this selection should have even been nominated for this award You don't think the selection should be considered for this award This selection is a weak finalist and barely worthy of runner-up status This selection is slightly below average for the finalists for this award The selection is average among finalists and thus not worthy ...

If the festival you are attending requires a ticket (whether free or for a fee), you will have multiple routes to buying a ticket. When in doubt, you can always click the “Ticketing” menu item at the top of any page. This page shows you the full list of tickets available for your festival. You can also start the purchase process from any event page....

If you have received an error that says, "Server Error" as part of the message, then we need to do further investigation. Please contact SparqFest support and include information about what you were doing when you received this message and the rough time when the error occurred. We apologize for this inconvenience....

We don't. Our payments gateway is the well-established Stripe payments system. SparqFest does not see or handle any credit card information. Instead, your audience ecommerce transactions go directly to Stripe. If they opt to have their credit card stored, Stripe is responsible for securely storing that information....

There are two parts to uploading your video:  the upload phase the ingest phase.  During the upload phase, your video file is being transferred from your computer to our servers. Once that is complete, the ingest phase begins. Once the ingest phase begins, you can close your browser or do other things. The ingest phase can vary from a few minutes to...

As much as you want, with the following caveats: You have not finalized your vote The judging deadline has not passed Once the judging deadline is reached, your votes and ratings are automatically finalized. You may not make any changes of any kind once your vote is finalized....

Scripts and pitch decks are uploaded on the “Media Assets” tab and listed as a “Screener”. Simply click on the box or drag your PDF onto the box and drop it. NOTE: the SparqFest web site for your festival DOES NOT make PDF documents available to the general public. Only festival staff and jury members have access to these documents. Check with your ...

SparqFest includes a streaming platform that enables you to configure online screening events and live streams. If you are a purely virtual festival, we have site themes that can present your festival as if it were a streaming channel. You can also configure your SparqFest environment to enable your audience to view individual titles on-demand. Onli...

If something in the system shows the phrase “Not Available for Deletion” instead of providing a link for deleting the item, that means something else in the system must be changed first. You will see this phrase in the selection editor, for example, when a selection has nominations in the judging module or has been programmed into screenings. Before...

If you have not yet registered, you will first need to register before purchasing a ticket. In fact, if you go to the “Tickets” page, it will immediately prompt you to login/register before viewing the tickets. The “Tickets” Page Regardless of how you access the “Tickets” page, it lists all tickets being sold by the festival. A sample “Tickets” page...

“My Recommendations” is a section of the review dialog that shows up only if there are awards currently accepting nominations from existing jury members. If no such awards exist, then you will not see a “My Recommendations” section and you cannot make recommendations....

When you enter your social media accounts under the marketing tab of your festival settings, you aren't connecting us to your social media accounts. We have no special permissions just because we know your social media handles, so we could not do anything even if we wanted to. If you want us to automate some of your social media activity, you must t...

SparqFest was originally written to support the operations of Minnesota WebFest well before COVID-19 forced them to look into holding an online event. Even if you are a purely in-person event, you certainly have the following challenges: Gathering exhibition copies from your filmmakers and other creators Collecting marketing information to help you ...

Yes, we use the powerful content delivery network and scaling capabilities within Amazon Web Services. Our team built and manages the streaming sites for SeekaTV and AcornTV with over 1M subscribers....

If you use a tool like Mailchimp to manage your contacts and communications for marketing and promotional purposes, you can configure SparqFest to send any contacts who register with us up to that tool. Marketing emails vs transactional emails SparqFest manages its own transactional emails (emails relating to the core function of the festival). We d...

Customization Effort: High Profile: Hybrid festivals wanting to promote online screenings Cautions: See notes on using custom fonts with this theme The Renaissance theme is a return to basics. It is a redesign of the original look and feel of SparqFest web sites with a 2020's style. Like other themes such as Festflix and Mediterranean, it provides a...

Yes, SparqFest is available for download on Apple TV and Roku devices....

Included in our standard pricing is yourfestival.sparqfest.live. If you would like a custom domain without sparqfest (e.g. online.yourfestival.com) you would signup for a one-time custom domain fee....

Festivals provide access to viewing or listening to selections online in one of two ways: Through an online screening On-demand A screening is simply an online reflection of how you would consume the content if you were attending in-person. It's a block consisting of one or more selections that you watch in sequence. On-demand access enables you to ...

SparqFest will import data about your Official Selections from a FilmFreeway export, contact the filmmakers, and request assets that will meet the needs for both cinema and online screenings. We go beyond just gathering up exhibition copies. We make sure you have all of the basic information, posters, and other assets to promote and program your sel...

Both runners-up and finalists are nominees for an award. Externally, SparqFest does not distinguish between a finalist or a runner-up. For many festivals, all nominees are finalists. If a festival has both finalists and runners-up for an award, this means that some level of pre-judging has occurred before you are tasked to step in and perform your j...

Our Judging Module supports audience choice awards in addition to traditional juried awards. We are able to merge online and in-person voting across any number of audience choice categories while protecting the integrity of your audience choice vote....

Audience Choice Awards are both loved and hated at film festivals. At their worst, they are easy to game and make people roll their eyes.  At their best, audience choice awards provide a unique avenue to award creators. With the advent of online screening, figuring out a way to execute audience choice awards across online and in-person audiences has...

If none of our themes suits your brand or functional objectives, SparqFest can (for an additional fee): Design a custom site based on your brand and site objectives Implement the design as a SparqFest site theme that only you can use Contact our sales staff for a quote....

The location of the link to access the Staff Portal varies depending on the site theme for which your SparqFest site is configured. Typically, you will find it either in the page footer or in the profile menu after you login. If the link is at the bottom of the page and you are not logged in, the site will first prompt you to login and then redirect...

Most festivals require tickets to attend both online and in-person events. If your festival does not require tickets, you can simply browse the online events and selections and watch whatever you like. If, on the other hand, your festival requires tickets, this document explains how to purchase, transfer, claim, and use tickets with your festival. S...

Audience choice voting is always something that the filmmakers love and audience members want. It's also something that most festival directors hate. We hate the tedium of remembering to give out the ballots, collecting the ballots, explaining the rules, the tallying of the ballots, and then the ultimate popularity contest that can often ensue. Spar...

Once you have decided that SparqFest is the right solution for your festival, go to the “Payment Method” tab under “Account” > “Subscription” and provide a credit card number for us to charge. At the end of your trial, we will charge your card for the full one-year subscription and retain the card to renew your subscription in future years....

Live streams are one of the three classes of events supported by SparqFest. To begin the process of setting up a live stream, go to “Programming” > “Live Streams”. When you visit this section, you see a list of currently configured live streams for the selected edition of the festival. To create a live stream, click the "+ create" button. This ac...

Note: the word “screening block” refers to either a virtual screening (people watching a block online) or an in-person screening (people gathering at your festival to watch on a screen). We are in the middle of changing the user interface to specifically use the terms “virtual screening” and “in-person screening” instead of "screening block", but yo...

Each in-person screening has a QR code that you can scan to “get credit” for all of the selections in that screening block. Different festivals will take different approaches to presenting this QR code. It may be in a hand-out at the screening or on a sign. Often, it will appear on screen at the start of the screening block. The best approach is to ...

By this point, you should have a site that is looking like you want it to look (even if the content is non-existent) and a list of submissions loaded into SparqFest. SparqFest, however, doesn't actually operate on submissions. Instead, you must promote a "submission" into a "selection" so you can program it in the festival. Step 1: Review the Submis...

There are a number of places in the Staff Portal as well as the Creator Portal where content owners and festival staff can control access to online content based on a visitor's physical location. For creators, they can control online access to their projects in the Geo Blocking section under Film Extras. Festival staff can configure geographic restr...

SparqFest has so many features and its unlikely you care about each one. To get to a decision in 2 weeks, you should therefore think about the “make or break” features we offer. Most people come in looking to focus on one of the following: "I want to solve asset gathering once and for all" “I need help organizing my festival events and presenting th...

SparqFest supports live streaming across a variety of platforms, including Twitch, YouTube, and Facebook. In addition, we provide a native live streaming platform for scenarios in which you need to enforce ticketed access to your live streams. We also track simulcasts so audience members know about all of their attendance options....

Receipts and invitations are the two most “brand-sensitive” emails that SparqFest sends on your behalf. While you can control the bulk of your invitations simply by editing the invitation template in the Email Templates subsection ("Settings" > “Email Templates”), SparqFest supports the customization only of a short message via email templates. I...

Both audience choice and juried awards follow the same life cycle. This article briefly outlines each step of the process and how you get from the creation of an award to announcing a winner. Nominating When you create a new award, it starts in the “Nominating” state. During this initial phase, the person managing the voting process has the followin...

The Staff Technical Director is for the festival that wants a known technical expert to handle all aspects of technology for their festival, whether the issue is an online issue, a ticketing issue, or a projection issue. It includes everything associated with the Virtual Technical Director service, but extends that service to a dedicated, named staf...

The festival welcome video should be 1940x692 or 3880x1384. Though it will not play with sound, it should have an empty audio track. If your video deviates from the above aspect ratio (2.803:1) in any way, your home page will look wrong....

No. The WeTransfer terms of service prevent the automatic download of files. WeTransfer is useful only for sending people links so they may manually download those files....

SparqFest has several support options to meet the unique support requirements for film festivals. For 51 weeks out of the year, you are not that concerned about how quickly we respond to your queries or how quickly we address those queries. For that other week? Any delay is too long.  SparqFest support offerings balance three separate concerns: Who ...

Enhanced Priority support provides the same support levels as Priority Support , but it also makes end-user support our concern instead of yours. No longer do you have to perform the front-line support for creator, jury, and audience issues—we take care of that for you so you can focus on running your festival. We recommend this level of support for...

If you have an Apple TV 4 or later, you can attend any virtual screenings and live streams from your own living room through the SparqFest app for Apple TV. The SparqFest App The SparqFest app is a single app that provides access to all participating festivals using the SparqFest platform. To be accessible via the SparqFest app, a festival must: Hav...

There's not much of a how-to for uploading a script or pitch slide deck: simply upload a PDF version of your script or pitch (or whatever category is asking for a document-based screener). We accept only PDF documents. The more critical information is: what do we do with those documents? Like any selection in the festival, you will have a selection ...

To rate a selection, go to the review dialog for that nominee and navigate to the bottom of the review dialog. You will see 10 stars. Click on the star that matches the rating you want to apply to the nominee. You may change this rating as many times as you like until you finalize your vote or the judging deadline passes. ...

We save you time by making the process more efficient to collect the digital assets, automatically create the film and screening block pages, provide easier communication with creators and judges and more. We also provide an exceptional viewer experience as we have successfully delivered 10+ years of streaming for clients including Acorn TV and Seek...

TBD...

SparqFest stores all site content in a “dictionary” that maps placeholders in our site templates to translations in our supported languages (the article Languages and Localization discusses language support in detail). We allow you to customize any text by editing this dictionary. Leveraging this customization feature, you can alter SparqFest termin...

If you use any Google or Apple product, including owning an Android or iOS Smartphone, then you do have an account with one of these providers. If you do not have an account, creating one is free.  Instead of logging in, click “Create account”....

When you sign up for a SparqFest free trial, you get a SparqFest site with all of the portals. This site will transition to your live site if you decide to subscribe to SparqFest. We do not place watermarks anywhere and we do not restrict your functionality. You select your target plan and the site operates with the features of that target plan. Sig...

The last "must-do" task for every festival is programming the content. There are so many nuances to festival programming that are well beyond the scope of this series of initial setup articles, but this article will help you get your selections into screenings and determine what next steps are appropriate to you. Note: a selection must be programmed...

Standard support is included with every SparqFest subscription without an additional charge. It is for festivals who are comfortable providing front-line support to their users for non-technical issues and who are comfortable with business-hour availability and slower turnaround times. Price: Included with all subscriptions Included in our standard ...

As part of your participation in a SparqFest festival, we are creating a selection page for your project designed to promote attendance at screenings of your project and enhance your online SEO rankings. To create a beautiful online presence for your selection, we need standardized posters. We have chosen poster sizes that you should have regardless...

If your festival team uses collaboration tools like Slack, SparqFest can keep your entire team up to date on everything happening inside SparqFest. You have a wide set of options on how you configure our collaboration integration, but the basic idea is that when something happens in SparqFest, we tell a channel in your collaboration tool about it. A...

Cloud Synchronization Requires an Add-on Purchase Because of the bandwidth costs we incur for this feature, access to it requires that you have a subscription specifically licensed for cloud synchronization. The feature is available under every subscription level at a small additional cost. If you have not licensed this feature, you will see a padlo...

As our audience choice voting functionality has evolved, we've added a number of features to encourage festival attendees to take part in the voting. This articles describes both what SparqFest does to maximize participation as well as suggestions of things you can do. SparqFest Features When a viewer watches any content online, SparqFest sends them...

Go into “Settings” > “Editions” and look at the “Marketing” tab for the current edition of your festival. Is “Publicize Selections” set to “Yes”? As long as publicizing selections is enabled, the site will display all selections with enough information from their creators to be meaningful....

You add submissions to SparqFest either through direct creation or through an import process. The import process is the typical, preferred mechanism for entering submissions. The direct creation approach exists solely for submissions that come through irregular channels such as invites and direct selections. Before You Start You should have already ...

As mentioned in the Sales Overview document, pricing is something you define independent of the things you are selling. Two products can share the same pricing. If you make a single update to that pricing, all products that use that pricing are automatically changed. Pricing is not as simply as assigning a value to something. It's about setting rule...

To get going with SparqFest configuration, you will need to go to your SparqFest site and login. Everything happens in the Staff Portal which you can typically access via a link at the bottom of the public site home page. Some themes, however, may place this link in your profile menu. If it prompts you for an invitation code, then the user you logge...

Before you create a live stream, you must first select a streaming platform. SparqFest's role is to serve as promoter and gatekeeper to the live stream. An example configuration might look like this: Live stream tool: OBS Live stream platform: Twitch Promotional page: SparqFest Viewing page: Twitch  Before you can fully configure SparqFest for a liv...

No matter what your process for accepting submissions, SparqFest can bring in all the data you have for your submissions and turn them into Official Selections. There are specifically two ways to get a submission into SparqFest: Import from a CSV file (like what FilmFreeway provides you) Direct creation If you are impatient and simply want to import...

At SparqFest, we have put a lot of work into both data security and privacy.  The core areas of focus are: Enabling you to adhere to various data sovereignty and privacy laws Giving users maximal control over their own data Ensuring the integrity of e-commerce transactions and making sure we are not a vector of attack on anyone's financial or passwo...

Need greater availability on specific dates? Need a faster turnarounds on specific dates? The on-call add-on is an add-on to any support tier that provides specialized availability and turnaround times on specific days (typically, critical festival dates). You pay a daily fee to get rapid access to our support team at any time of the day or night. P...

When someone invites you to collaborate in SparqFest, you will receive an invitation with a 6 character invitation code if you don't already have an account with that festival. In most cases, you can simply click the “Accept Invitation” button in the email and that will guide you through the process of getting an account setup with SparqFest. You wi...

SparqFest enables you to create discounts that people can use to make purchases at a discounted rate (or even for free). You configure festival discounts in the “Finance” section under “Discounts”. A sample listing of discounts in the “Discounts” subsection What Is a SparqFest Discount? The first thing you should notice about discounts is that they ...

Go to “Programming” > “Selections” and click the selection you wish to delete as if you were going to make changes to it. At the bottom of the selection editor is a link to “Delete Permanently”. Click that link to delete the selection. You will be prompted to confirm the deletion. If you see text that says “Not Available for Deletion”, then you c...

With SparqFest, you can handle your filmmaker Q&As associated with screenings in a number of different ways depending on whether they are online, simulcast, or both and how much interactivity you are looking for from online participants. This article covers some of the different approaches. In-Person Q&A When the Q&A happens only at the ...

When someone invites you to collaborate in SparqFest, you will receive an invitation with a 6 character invitation code if you don't already have an account with that festival. In most cases, you can simply click the “Accept Invitation” button in the email and that will guide you through the process of getting an account setup with SparqFest. You wi...

We are quite transparent with our pricing, with all pricing items listed on at www.sparqfest.live/pricing. Most of our features are included in the annual subscription agreement, with just a few add-ons such as custom domains and excess usage charges....

Priority support is for festivals that require quicker response times during your festival than our Basic Support  package allows. As with Basic support, you provide the front-line support for your users and route any technical issues to SparqFest. Price: $150/year Included in our Priority support: Resources: The SparqFest Knowledge Base (this site)...

Once you are done, you will receive an email indicating that you have completed all tasks. In addition, your project will show as 100% complete, all tasks green, and no error message at the bottom of your selection panel. If you are not yet done, your project will show a completion level less than 100% with a red error message indicating what is mis...

Customization Effort: Moderate Profile: In-person festivals using our free subscription with an emphasis on festival schedule. Cautions: Filmmakers with bad posters The Explorer is our first theme for free subscriptions. Because our free plan does not support the upload and management of video assets, this theme is exclusively for the in-person fest...

Most of your work as a juror takes place in what is called the “Judging” phase of the overall judging process. The phases are: Nominating Judging (Tiebreaking) Approving Complete Nominating When you first receive your invitation to judge, the award you are assigned will almost certainly be in the “Nominating” phase. You can have a look at the nomine...

The Jury Portal is a portal in the Sparq Festival Platform (SparqFest) where jury members review festival nominees, deliberate with one another, and ultimately pick winners for the festival awards. You may always access the Jury Portal by visiting your festival site and clicking on the “Jury Portal” link. This link is in the lower right footer for m...

Out of the box, we collect: Exhibition copies of the selections Trailers Landscape and portrait posters Complete meta-data, including everything in FilmFreeway In addition, you can define custom assets and meta-data that you want to gather from filmmakers based on what category they submitted under....

Congratulations on finishing up your first edition using SparqFest! We hope the festival was a great success! SparqFest is designed with the knowledge that you really, really do not want to be thinking about the festival in the first few weeks after the close of your festival. We therefore have automated the transition to the “off-season” for you. I...

The location of the link to access the Jury Portal varies depending on the site theme for which your SparqFest site is configured. Typically, you will find it either in the page footer or in the profile menu after you login. If the link is at the bottom of the page and you are not logged in, the site will first prompt you to login and then redirect ...

Customization Effort: High Profile: In-Person or Hybrid with an In-Person Focus Cautions: Festivals with separate in-person and online dates Mediterranean is a site theme that emphasizes the in-person festival. The home page is simple with the goal of driving the audience to the events that most interest them. An example of a Mediterranean home page...

Yes. When you are uploading your video, select “Dropbox” for the “File Location” field. A button will appear for selecting the file from Dropbox. When you select the file, we will automatically transfer that file from Dropbox to the festival's storage. You may be asked to sign in to Dropbox and grant us permission to access the file if you have not ...

We currently support 6 languages (Basque, English, French, German, Italian, and Spanish) for your web site and 7,907 languages for your festival selections (all living, extinct, historic, and constructed languages). We also do full localization of numbers, currencies, and dates and eliminate the need for your visitors to perform any “timezone math” ...

Your SparqFest subscription includes support for online streaming of your Official Selections as well as support for a number of different live streaming architectures. Online Screenings When we collect screeners from your creators, we stage those assets for use in both in-person and online screenings. For in-person screenings, festival staff (and n...