Once you have completed your film or audio project, you will need to decide how you will be publishing and distributing it.

Publishing platforms for videos

Platforms where you can publish videos include YouTube, Vimeo, and Dailymotion.

Even if your project is audio-based, you can still upload it to a video-sharing platform by converting it to a video. You can do this by importing the audio file of your project into video editing software (such as Kdenlive), then exporting the project as a video file such as an .mp4 file or another supported file format (YouTube has a list of supported file formats for videos).

If you are planning on converting your audio file to a video, it would be a good idea to add an image and/or text to the video before you render it so that your video will have a thumbnail. This thumbnail could consist of an image related to the topic of your documentary (such as an image of the community) and text consisting of the title of your documentary.

Publishing platforms for audio

There are also platforms that are focused specifically on audio-based publishing.

A Guide to Academic Podcasting mentions a number of platforms that can be used to host podcasts, such as Buzzsprout, Simplecast, PodBean, and Spreaker (p. 2). Another hosting platform that you might use is Anchor.fm, which automatically distributes your podcast to Spotify. The Anchor.fm help pages have a section with instructions for submitting podcasts to different podcast syndicators such as Apple Podcasts and Google Podcasts.

Websites

Once you have published your documentary via one of the platforms above, you may want to create a website devoted to it. The advantage of having a website is that it would allow you to provide additional “behind-the-scenes” information about how the documentary was created, as well as about the people involved in the creation of the documentary. (The website for the documentary The Linguists is a good example of this.)

Platforms that allow you to create websites for free include WordPress.com and Github Pages. Some Stutter, Luh! is an example of a podcast website that uses Github Pages.

Features of publishing platforms

Beyond the ability to stream a video or audio file, hosting platforms offer a number of features that can be useful.

When you publish media on a hosting platform, there will likely be a description field where you can put information related to the file you are uploading. In this description field, you can include:

• A summary of what your documentary is about
• Credits (who was involved in the documentary)
• Salient quotes from the documentary
• Links to any websites with related or relevant information

YouTube has a Video Chapters feature that lets you mark the different sections of your video so that your audience can easily go to the section they are looking for.

If you use a hosting platform dedicated to audio, such as Anchor.fm, you may be able to select a custom thumbnail for your documentary, which could be a logo, a poster, or a frame from the documentary. A logo wouldn’t have to be anything too fancy; it could just be text containing the title of the documentary.