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.

SparqFest audience choice voting (part of our optional Judging Module) gets rid of the tedious tasks while minimizing the degree to which filmmakers can game the system and turn it into a skewed contest.

The Process

Our audience choice process supports both online and in-person audiences. You create the audience choice category (or categories), who should be considered for each category, and some basic rules around voting. For example, you can define an “Audience Choice, Short Film” that includes all short films entered in the festival with a voting deadline of 24 hours before the awards ceremony and require each audience member to have seen at least 3 of the short films in order to participate.

When a member of the audience watches a short film online, they get credit for that film. Once they reach 3 short films, they have the ability to vote for one of those three shorts online.

When a member of the audience attends an in-person screening, there are a number of ways you can credit them for having seen the in-person screening:

• We provide an “audience credit” QR code that you can show before each block or include in the festival program
• We will be rolling out a mobile app that will enable them to check in for an event and get credit for its selections

As with watching online, once the in-person attendee has credit for three films, they are allowed to vote on the same online voting page as if they had watched the screenings online. In fact, for hybrid festivals, we combine all online and in-person screening history for voting.

You have full control over the minimum viewing threshold. The more films you require, the fewer people you will have participating. The fewer films you require, the easier it is for one filmmaker to get all of their buddies to watch just their film and vote for it.

Vote Tabulation

Audience members can change their votes as many times as they like leading up to the voting deadline. Once the voting deadline passes, SparqFest will calculate the winner. Whoever you assign to approve voting then receives an email and must approve or override the winner.

Winners are made public whenever you turn on “publicize winners” for the category.