If you’ve used B-Side’s Festival Community software for a film festival in the past, the “new” product from B-Side may seem pretty familiar. And yes, it is basically the old Festival Community with some key changes. Those changes are so significant and excellent, however, that we thought a name change was in order. This is the smartest film festival schedule you’ve ever used. It’s a Festival Genius.

In this blog entry I’m going to go over the new features we’ve built for the Festival Genius, but you’re welcome to dive right in and play with it at the Festival Genius site for South by Southwest 2009. You can also check out the video tutorial at Vimeo that explains a few salient details (though this entry will be more comprehensive than the video).

Play the video tutorial now.

Grid View

One of the most requested features from festival directors and audience members alike is the schedule grid view. Though we still support the day and week list views as the more flexible methods of displaying large amounts of schedule data on one page, the grid view is a familiar method of visualizing schedule data at a film festival. If a festival (like SXSW) has too many venues to display on one page, you can click the “More Venues” link to expose additional venues.

The grid view also supports the same filtering that you can do with the list views – so if you want to see only documentary films from Spain, you can do that. If you want to further narrow it down to documentary films from Spain playing at the Paramount, you can do that too. If you’re logged in to your Festival Genius account, you can add films to your calendar from any list or grid schedule page.

Schedule Genius

This is the heart of the technical bad-assery in the Festival Genius. It’s an idea we’ve been kicking around for a long while and now we have it working. If you’re a hard core film fan, one of the of the least enjoyable aspects of attending a film festival is the mental workout of constructing your schedule. Which films should you see when, and what if you miss out on something really cool because of a schedule conflict? At a festival like South by Southwest where some films screen as many as three times, there has to be an optimal schedule that will let you attend (almost) every movie you want to see – if only you could figure it out.

Enter the Schedule Genius. Simply add the desired films to your schedule – don’t worry about whether they conflict or not – and run the Genius. Taking into account what days you’ll be attending the festival and even the average travel time between venues (we suggest 45 minutes for SXSW), the Schedule Genius will rejigger your events and present you with the best of all possible schedules given the events in question. Don’t like the results, or need to tweak it a little manually? Go ahead, the Genius will adjust around your overrides and even show you what the trade-offs are before you commit.

Download Your Schedule in iCal Format

Once you have your schedule created, you’ll want some way to take it with you during the festival. Sure, you could print it out or use the mobile-optimized version of the site (see below), but lots of people these days have a personal calendar on their computer, or on the web, or even on their phone. Wouldn’t it be great to put your festival events on your everyday calendar? Well so long as that calendar supports the internet-standard iCal format, you can.

Just flip to any schedule page on the Festival Genius site and click the “Download Schedule” link. You can download an iCal file of the entire festival schedule or your own personal schedule. If you prefer to subscribe to your Genius calendar events instead of performing a one-time import, just right-click (control-click for Macs) on the link of your choice and copy the link. Then use your calendar program to subscribe to the feed. (It’s different for every calendar system so you’ll have to look that up on your own.)

Print Your Schedule

This one is pretty straightforward, but we put some extra effort into creating a nice clean page layout that looks great when you hit print. Print the full festival schedule (30-something pages for SXSW 2009) or just your personal schedule. You can even print a filtered view of the full festival lineup. Go ahead, make a printout of all the Narrative Features from Mexico. You know you wanna.

Optimized for Mobile Devices

When you point your iPhone, Blackberry, Android, or other mobile web device at the Festival Genius site, it displays a special version of the site that takes best advantage of the limited screen space and internet bandwidth that mobile devices possess. That doesn’t mean we’ve skimped on features, though. With the mobile version you can:

• Browse the schedule in list view

• Add films to your personal calendar

• See the details page for each event, including a still image, the synopsis and other info

• Rate and review films

• Search films by title and/or cast & crew

• Watch trailers (linked from the details page) if your device supports the video format. (We’ve tested it on the iPhone and some Blackberries.)

Check out the slideshow below for some example screens captured on the iPhone. Your experience may vary on a different device.

That pretty much wraps it up for the Festival Genius for now. We’re always working on new features but we think you’ll agree that this will change the way film festival fans make their plans.

We’d love to hear your thoughts on the Festival Genius; get in touch at help at bside dot com. Be sure to tell your friends and to use Festival Genius to make your SXSW plans. Come back and rate some movies when you’re done!

Go to the SXSW 2009 Festival Genius site now.

Update: Now there’s a Festival Genius site for Hot Docs 2009!