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 Submissions

Depending on how you performed your import, your Submissions subsection may be populated only with selected submissions or may have submissions that reflect a variety of different statuses. You should now take a second a look over your submissions to make sure each one has the proper status, category mapping, and submitter information.

You may notice that you can't really change much if you try to edit a submission. SparqFest does not view itself as the authoritative source for submission data. Instead, it expects that the authoritative data for the submission is coming from an external source like FilmFreeway. Nevertheless, you can make some changes at the risk of having them overwritten if another import is performed.

Submission Status

SparqFest supports the following submission status values:

• Undecided
• Deferred
• Selected
• Rejected

SparqFest does not care about any submissions except submissions in a "Selected" state. All other submissions are generally ignored and supported solely for the purposes of traceability.

The only things you really need to worry about right now is that the decision status reflects the true decision status.

Submitter Contact Information

When you perform the promotion described in the next section, you will be prompted to notify the submitter of the selected project so they can begin the process of managing their selection. Obviously, you cannot do that if there is no contact information. You should also prepare yourself for the fact that there will always be one or two submitters who put bad contact information in FilmFreeway.

Submission Category Mappings

When someone submits their project to your festival in FilmFreeway, they can submit the same project under multiple categories. If both FilmFreeway categories map to the same submission category, then the submission in SparqFest will be associated with a single submission category. Consider, for example, if your festival has people submit under different genres. So, you have "Horror Shorts" and "Comedy Shorts" categories in FilmFreeway. A horror/comedy wanting to be considered under both categories could thus be accepted under one, both, or neither.

The whole "submitting to multiple categories" thing is an absolute nightmare to deal with. In part, the nightmare derives from the fact that FilmFreeway simply lets you accept a submission, not accept a submission to a category. So, if you to accept the above submission under "Horror Shorts" but reject it under "Comedy Shorts", FilmFreeway does not allow you to do so. 

If you have mapped both "Comedy Shorts" and "Horror Shorts" to a single "Shorts" submission category in SparqFest, then the submission will show up in SparqFest as accepted and categorized under "Shorts". If, on the other hand, you mapped "Comedy Shorts" to a submission category of the same name and "Horror Shorts" to a "Horror Shorts" submission category, the submission will show up in SparqFest as "Selected" with two categories.

In both cases, what SparqFest does may be exactly what you want to happen. If, however, you don't want the selection accepted to "Horror Shorts", you will need to delete that submission category from the imported submission.

We'll cover more issues to consider around submission category mappings in the next section.

Step 2: Promote to Official Selection

The process of turning a submission into a selection is called "promotion". You may promote only selected submissions. The promotion process automatically ignores any submission that is not in a "Selected" state.

To begin promoting, go into the Submissions subsection of the Submitting section ("Submitting" > "Submissions") and click "☼ promote all submissions". SparqFest will first give you a warning dialog to ask you to confirm the promotion. While annoying, this dialog prevents you from accidentally promoting when you aren't yet ready.

Once you confirm the promotion, another dialog will pop up asking you if you'd like to notify the creators behind the submissions. If you select "Yes", SparqFest will send the creator an email with a link that gives them access to manage their newly promoted selection in the Creator Portal. In other words, they will both know that their work is selected and have access to make changes at this point.

If you answer "No", the submission is promoted but the submitters are not told about the promotion.

In truth, this action simply promotes all "Selected" submissions that have not yet been promoted.  The process will take a long time.

The Promotion Process

When a submission is promoted, one or more selections are created for that submission and all submission data is copied into the new selection. 

One or more? As noted above, each submission can be associated with multiple submission categories. Each selection, however, can be associated with exactly one submission category. Consider the example of a film that submits to FilmFreeway under "Trailer" and "Promotional Pitch" categories with the same project. When we perform that import, you will definitely have separate submission categories configured for Trailer and Promotional Pitch. The submission will thus have two submission categories.

In reality, these are two distinct selections because they require different media and meta-data. The trailer requires a video and the pitch requires a PDF. When you promote this submission, SparqFest will create two distinct selections for that submission.

Unfortunately, you may have configured your submission categories in a way that makes this double-selection feature undesirable. Part of the review process from Step 1 should thus be to review any submissions mapping to multiple categories and making sure you want to see multiple selections created for that submission.

Creator Access

Assuming you indicated that you want the creators to be notified, they will receive an email from the email address you configured when setting up the festival in . If you misconfigured the email settings, no emails will go out.

What the creator receives depends on whether or not they already have a login with your festival. Since this article is about initial configuration, no one should have accounts. The creator will therefore receive an email containing an invitation code. They can simply click on a link in that email and it will walk them through all the necessary steps to gain access to the Creator Portal. Alternately, they can go to your festival site and manually accept the invitation using the code in the email.

Staff Access

You have the same ability to edit the newly created selection as does the creator, but you use a different form. Instead of the Creator Portal, you will go to the Selections subsection of the Programming section ("Programming" > "Selections"). Click on the selection you wish to edit and make any necessary changes.

Submission and Selection Data

Submission and selection data are separately maintained in SparqFest. When the selection is created, all submission data gets copied to create the selection record. This approach means that no one has to re-enter any data that was originally provided to FilmFreeway, but the data can still change without impacting any future imports you need to make from FilmFreeway.

As an example, if you or the creator changes the synopsis for the selection, you will both see the new synopsis in both portals. The old synopsis from FilmFreeway, however, will still remain in the Submissions subsection. In fact, once you promote a submission, the submission record exists mostly for historical purposes and is not longer important to the system.

Step 3: Turn on "Publicize Selections"

If you remember back to your work on edition settings during the Edition Setup, there was a setting in the Marketing tab called "Publicize Selections". It starts out as "No" and we told you to leave it that way. Assuming that you have now promoted all your selections, now is a great time to flip that setting to "Yes".

If "Publicize Selections" is set to "Yes", you will now slowly start to see selections show up on your public web site as creators provide sufficient information. In addition, all selections will now be showing up in your JSON feed of Official Selections.

Next Up: Programming the Festival