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 into a virtual screening block to be available online

Types of Events

When we talk about "programming the festival", we are referring to the act of scheduling the events that make up an edition of your festival. By now, you should know that we support the programming of both in-person and online events. In particular, SparqFest supports the programming of:

• Virtual screenings
• Live streams and simulcasts
• In-person events, including in-person screenings

You naturally set all of this up in the Programming section of the Staff Portal.

The Programming section of the SparqFest Staff Portal

The Schedule

The first thing you see when you come to the Programming section is currently the schedule you see above. This feature will be changing in a future release to provide a more useful view. It does, however, list every single event and deadline associated with your festival into a weekly calendar view. We are altering this in a future release because most of the time it is showing an empty week (unless you happen to be in the middle of your festival, at which point you are done with your programming tasks).

You don't need to wait for the schedule to finish loading to go to one of the other subsections.

Selections

You briefly got a look at the Selections subsection in the previous article, “Selections”. This subsection is where you can see all of the Official Selections in your festival along with whatever progress creators have made in uploading their assets.

A list of Official Selections for the festival and their current status

You will spend a lot of time in this subsection. Though we take a lot of the pain of gathering assets from creators, you are still relying on the creators to actually follow through. 

The first thing to notice is the check mark (or other symbol) at the start of each selection:

• Green check or blue "i": Good
• Yellow warning on red prohibited: Bad

The green check means that you have absolutely everything requested. The blue "i" means you have everything that SparqFest needs, but you may be missing some of the custom questions you asked. Either way, the selection is ready to be shown in the festival.

 A yellow warning sign indicates that SparqFest has enough information to show the selection on the public site, but not enough information (specifically, an exhibition copy with required captions/subtitles) to actually show the selection during the festival.

Finally, a red prohibited sign means critical information is missing for even displaying the selection on the web site and/or you do not have permission from the creator to show the selection in your festival.

More details around selections are discussed in another article.

Screening Blocks

The Screening Blocks tab is where you manage virtual screenings. We will spend more time on screening blocks later in this document.

Live Streams

A live stream is any content you are sending out "live" to an online audience. By live, we mean that the entire audience is watching together in real-time. The actual content may also be live, or it may be pre-recorded. We don't touch on live streams in this initial setup series, but you can read about our support for live streams in detail in the article on live streaming.

In-Person Events

An in-person event is simply any event that takes place at a physical venue that can be attended by your festival audience. In this article, we will focus solely on in-person screenings. You can, however, configure a variety of different kinds of online events, including:

• Awards ceremonies
• Networking events
• Presentations
• Workshops
• Panels
• Anything else

Step 1: Create a Screening Event

The steps for creating virtual and in-person screenings are largely the same. The primary difference is that you will specify a venue for your in-person screening. For the purposes of this initial setup document, we will walk through the creation of a virtual screening. If you are working with an in-person festival, you will need to go into the Settings section and add your venue to the Venues subsection before you can create the in-person screening.

What Is a Screening?

You have been running this festival for ages and you know exactly what a screening is! However, we'll take a moment to talk about how SparqFest views a screening and how virtual screenings are meant to map to the traditional in-person screening.

From a SparqFest perspective, a screening is simply a collection of one or more pieces of video (or audio) content that should be watched together in a specific order. In an in-person context, this naturally means you sit down in a theater or other venue at an appointed time and watch a bunch of shows together. When it comes to virtual, our goal is to provide a meaningful replication of this experience while also leveraging the advantages being online.

The bottom line: when programming a screening event (virtual or in-person), you are placing one or more selections into a programming order to be promoted and viewed as a unit.

Setting Up a Screening

To create a new virtual screening, go to the Screening Blocks subsection and click the "+ create" button. Creating an in-person screening involves clicking the "+ create" button while in the In-Person Events subsection.

Dialog for creating a new screening block

Virtual Screenings

With an online screening block, timezones have less meaning than for an in-person screening. The dialog thus asks whether you want times to be set according to the festival timezone or the visitor's time zone. For example, if your festival is in Atlanta (US/Eastern GMT-4) and the screening block is set for a 12:00 noon start and I am in Houston (US/Central GMT-5):

• If you configure the block for the festival timezone, I can start watching it at 11:00 US/Central
• If you configure the bloc for the viewer timezone, I can start watching it at 12:00 US/Central

Another option for online screening blocks is that their duration is not limited to the runtime of the content. Typically, festivals run their online screenings for the duration of the festival. In that case, you should set the screening block to end "With Festival".

On rare occasions (typically, for world premieres), you may want to limit the amount of time a specific block is available for online screening. In that situation, select "At a Specific Time" for the block end. A new field will appear asking you when the block should end.

In-Person Screenings

In-person screenings have definite start and end times and they are always in the venue time zone. When creating an in-person screening, however, you are really creating a generic event. You need to take the additional steps of specifying a venue and letting SparqFest know that the new event is a screening.

When you create an in-person screening, it starts as a generic event

As noted earlier in this article, the venue must be setup in the Settings section before you can create an in-person event for that venue.

Step 2: Program the Screening

In this section, we are going to focus on the act of programming a screening. Programming a screening follows exactly the same process whether the screening is virtual or in-person. We will ignore all of the other settings in this article. To program a screening, go to the Program tab.

The program tab itself varies slightly between virtual and in-person screenings. With a virtual screening, you can add a pre-roll to run at the start of the block and also provide a link to send people to when they are done watching the block. With an in-person screening, you can change the event type to something other than a screening (which means you can no longer program selections) and you are provided with something called a "proof-of-attendance" QR code. You can safely ignore these differences now and focus on the bottom of the form where you "Add Selections".

The program for a Screening Block called "Minnesota Made"

The screenshot above is for a virtual screening block from the Minnesota WebFest festival. This section looks exactly the same for in-person screenings. It allows you to specify which selections will run in the screening and the order in which they will be screened. 

To program a selection, click "Add Selections". A dropdown will appear that enables you to search for a specific selection. You can then either click the selection and it will be added to the end of the block, or you can drag it to the specific spot in the block where you want it to show.

The dropdown will stay open so that you can quickly add multiple selections. You can program any selection at this point, even if the creator has not yet entered any information in the Creator Portal. Nevertheless, you can see at a glance whether or not the selection is ready for screening via the status icon. In this example, Marcellus still is not ready to screen in the festival program because it lacks captions and this festival requires them.

If you have a big enough screen, another way to program a screening is to open the list of selections up in a separate window and drag them into the right spot in the block. 

To change the order of the block, grab the drag handle for the selection and drag it to the spot in the block where you want the selection to be shown.

Your changes do not save automatically. Once you are done with configuring the block, you must click the "Save" button.

Step 3: Promote the Screening

You will obviously need to fill out all of the other required information for this event before it will appear on the web site. A screening (whether in-person or virtual) will be promoted on the web site once all of the required information has been added AND the current time is past the events "promotion start" time.

The "promotion start" time setting appears on the Marketing tab for both in-person and virtual screenings. It is a setting specifically design to let you control when the public can know about the screening. One key reason we don't just promote screenings on the web site immediately is because you may spend some time playing around with runtimes and you don't want creators making plans based on an interim schedule (especially when they may be making travel plans for in-person screenings).

The default value for the promotion start is always the start of the festival. That value is almost never what you desire, but it is a safe default that helps you avoid filmmakers screaming at you because they scheduled their flights and you changed the schedule. A very common mistake, however, is leaving the default value in place and then panicking because you don't see the screening on the web site.

Next Up: Ticketing and Festival Pricing