Working with the B-Side Festival Community

Welcome to the B-Side Festival Community. Film festivals across the nation are using the B-Side Festival Community
to provide you, the filmmaker with a chance to interact directly with your audience and build buzz for your film at the festival.

The best way
to build a brand for your film at a festival is to provide rich, engaging content for festival-goers that gets them excited to attend a screening and spread-the-word.

B-Side provides filmmakers with the ability to:

Add a trailer for their film
Create slideshows out of still images
Host a blog on their film’s details page

Instructions are included below for taking advantage of each of these capabilities.

Email filmmaker-support@bside.com with any questions.

Film Trailers

Filmmakers may upload trailers and images to be included on their film’s detail page.

Name: Please include the name of the festival and the name of your film somewhere in the filename of the the trailer.
Video Encoding: all trailers should either be MPEG2 or MPEG4 encoded at between 300 and 1000kbps into a .MPG .MOV or .AVI file format.
Video Formating: trailers that are 16:9 in aspect ratio and at least 420×240 are preferred, but 16:9, at least 320×180 is acceptable. It is important to remove any letterboxing from the trailer before uploading, as our automatic encoding adds its own letterbox. Having letterbox in the original file can result in a black border around all sides of the video.
Audio Encoding: trailers encoded in PCM, MP3, AAC are all acceptable.
Length: Trailer runtime should be no longer than 3 minutes.
Quality: We encode trailers into a 420×240 FLV object. The best way to control the quality of your video is to shrink it to 420×240 yourself with as little compression as possible.

Please do *not* send WMV encoded trailers or use WMA for audio encoding.

Click here to upload a trailer. Once you’re logged in,
find the folder corresponding to your film festival and create a directory inside of it named after the full title of your film. You may upload your content to this directory.

*** PLEASE DO NOT CHANGE THE PASSWORD ON THIS ACCOUNT, IT’S A SHARED ACCOUNT FOR ALL FILMMAKERS ***

Login: festival
Password: festival123

If you need assistance, upload what you have and / or send an email to filmmaker-support@bside.com

*** TRAILERS ARE VERIFIED MANUALLY BY OUR STAFF BEFORE BEING PLACED ON YOUR PAGE. THIS TYPICALLY HAPPENS WITHIN 24 HOURS. PLEASE SEND AN EMAIL TO FILMMAKER-SUPPORT@BSIDE.COM IF YOU DO NOT SEE YOUR TRAILER IN A TIMELY MANNER.

Image Slideshows

Filmmakers may upload still images to be included in a slideshow on their film’s detail page.

Name: Please include your film name in the filename of each image file.
Format: Please upload your images in .jpg, .gif., .png or .bmp format. Please do *not* upload .tif/.tiff or .pdf files.
Image Size: For best quality, please upload images sized to 420×240 pixels. Images that are not of that size will be automatically cropped and resized by B-Side. You can save on your upload time and have control of how your images are cropped if you crop and resize them yourself.
Image Quantity: Upload as many images as you like

Click here to upload images. Once you’re logged in,
find the folder corresponding to your film festival and create a directory inside of it with the named after the full title of your film. You may upload your content to this directory.

If you need assistance, upload what you have and / or send an email to filmmaker-support@bside.com

*** PLEASE DO NOT CHANGE THE PASSWORD ON THIS ACCOUNT, IT’S A SHARED ACCOUNT FOR ALL FILMMAKERS ***

Login: festival
Password: festival123

*** IMAGES ARE PROCESSED AUTOMATICALLY AND PLACED ON YOUR PAGE EVERY 2 HOURS. PLEASE SEND AN EMAIL TO FILMMAKER-SUPPORT@BSIDE.COM IF YOU DO NOT SEE YOUR IMAGES IN A TIMELY MANNER.

Blogging

A blog is a great way to keep audiences up to date with the latest news about your film. If you already have a blog, we can embed it on your film page. Just send an email to filmmaker-support@bside.com with your blog URL and we’ll be happy to take care of it.

Don’t have a blog yet? We recommend Google’s blogger site for setting up new film blogs, and we’ve put together instructions for how to do so. Download our step-by-step blog publishing instructions.