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), some of them are in Vimeo, some are sitting on a Google Drive, and yet others are just hanging out on the hard drives of your creators.

SparqFest simplifies this process for both you and your creators.

Just the Assets You Need

When you set up your festival in SparqFest, you define the assets you need to run your festival and the requirements around those assets. You can simply go with the common assets that are pre-defined in SparqFest like screeners, trailers, landscape posters, and portrait posters or you can define your own custom image formats (like a BTS still) or special videos (like a 30 second filmmaker intro). Whatever you need, SparqFest can gather it for you.

We Do the Nagging

Maybe nagging is a strong term. We send out regular reminders to creators who have yet to provide the information you need. As the deadline approaches, the reminders become more frequent. 

Inside the filmmaker portal, the creator has a view of their project with a “percentage complete” display and clear indications of any missing items. As we send out reminder emails, the reminder emails tell them exactly what is missing.

Don't Worry about Limits

We can accept nearly any video or image format of any size. If a filmmaker has the patience to wait for a 100GB screener to upload, we will happily accept it and transcode it. If a filmmaker uploads an image that has twice the desired resolution, we'll scale it down.

Of course, not all tolerance is good. You don't want a filmmaker to upload a 16x16 bitmap for a square poster for your print program. When a filmmaker tries to provide an asset like this that simply won't work for the intended purpose, we will let them know. In fact, we provide them with Photoshop templates for all of our standard posters.

Secure Storage, But Easy Access

All of the assets we gather are stored based on the security requirements specific to that asset.Most files are stored in private cloud storage that only festival staff may access online. The exception to this rule are the posters for the online site. Video assets are then transcoded for streaming where online viewing of the assets is necessary. 

If you need to download posters and video files in bulk, there's no need to go into our portal and download everything one at a time. Instead, you can use our cloud storage synchronization features to push assets from SparqFest into a cloud storage account like a Dropbox or Google Drive account.