Components and Concepts

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, ...

Appearance and Festival Configuration

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...

Edition Setup

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 ...

Submissions

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...

Selections

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...

Programming the Festival

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...

Ticketing

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...