<aside> ⚠️ If you are interested in this sponsorship, please contact Ned Donovan at [email protected] or book time on his calendar here.
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New Jersey Web Festival is an international film festival for all forms of web-based content as well as one of FilmFreeway’s top-rated festivals in the world. We feature web series, fiction podcasts, actual play content, music videos, trailers, pilots, short films, and more. We hold the distinct honor of being the first film festival experience for fiction podcasts / actual play creators.
Our festival is for creators, by creators. Each member of our team comes from the web-based creation world. This hands-on knowledge and deep personal tie to the community allows us to throw a festival that is entirely creator-focused. For four days we offer workshops, panels, networking opportunities, and screenings for creators who come from all over the world to Montclair, New Jersey.
The motto of our festival is “Feel the Magic” and that encapsulates the experience we offer to our attendees. But don’t take our word for it, we have over 100 five-star reviews on FilmFreeway. Here are some testimonials from previous attendees:
Film Festivals are an established part of the film industry. A space for networking, learning, and showcasing a creator’s work while also having an adjudicated awards process. The New Jersey Web Fest falls in a long line of top-tier film festivals that have established judging processes for our filmed content.
However, while awards have existed in the Audio Fiction space for many years, the film festival model has never been applied to this space. Prior to the NJWF there were only two kinds of awards events for this market:
In both of these scenarios the results become not representative or fairly weighted/considered. At the New Jersey Web Festival we set out to solve both of these issues. First, every submission pays a single fee that makes them eligible to be considered for every single award. That makes every show have the same chances for the same financial commitment.
Every submission that we receive is considered by multiple industry professionals across a wide range of focuses. Each judge fills out a form that turns their judging into a numerical result in a spreadsheet. All of the shows have an average score calculated and the top-scoring shows are accepted to the festival. In addition each judge marks what award(s) they would nominate a show for should it be accepted. From the acceptances and those answers we build award nominations. New judges are then found who specialize in those categories to pick winners. The series that receives the most votes in a category wins the award.
This is a huge undertaking throughout the year that is only possible because of our incredible judges. Every year we look to have more and more judges considering our submissions creating even more fair and representative acceptances to our festival. We pay our judges an honorarium to thank them for their work; however, in order to keep our submission fees low we are limited in the number of judges we have per submission.
On top of helping fund festival operations including location rental, event planning, guest and keynote payments, event planning, food for attendees, and more; 30% of this sponsorship will be earmarked to directly pay the honorariums of our judges. Increasing the number of judges on every single submission is the best way to ensure that the awards at the New Jersey Web Festival are the most fair and representative in the industry.
Cost: $5,000
Maximum Judge Sponsors: 10