Hi 
This is our November newsletter, and some of you will be wondering 'Why? It's still October?' 

It's a fair thought - and hopefully our rationale is just as good. 

If we stuck to our habit of sending our newsletters out on the first Tuesday morning of the month, this one would arrive in your inbox during the festival run. 

So, we thought, why not go early - and give people a reminder of all that's good before it starts to happen? 

We've kept this one all about us (although you should definitely check out the latest Web Series World Cup and Audio Fiction World Cup rankings to see how some of our selections are faring).

Dive on in to see what you can enjoy or forever regret missing out on during our festival this year, from Sunday 5 November through to the end of Monday 13 November. 

Enjoy!

 
Team #NZWF23

Here's a pretty easy one to kick us off - where to enjoy all the selections. 

From 7pm Sunday 5 November (NZ time, UTC+13 hours), you can check out and enjoy as many as you want to of the 200 or so podcasts, shorts and web series we've selected this year. 

They're free to enjoy, but you do have to register to receive the link to access them. If you haven't done it already, register here to receive the URL and password for when it all kicks off.

If you're organised and like to make a plan, you can see what we've selected here

When we started NZ Web Fest, back in 2015, we had a pretty clear mission statement: to curate and celebrate online content and its creators. 

One way we try to do that is to select, nominate and award. Another way is to give some of the creators a platform to talk. Which is where our Creator Convos come in.

Through the week of the festival, we'll be delivering some panel sessions with creators of some of our award nominees. Some of the sessions are pre-recorded, because time differences, and some run live on Saturday 11 November. 

You can check them out on facebook as they happen or later. If you follow @NZWebFest on facebook, you'll get one of those little notification thingies when we start a live session.   

For info on what's on when, check out the programme page on our website.

We've got four award sessions this year, and we've got a couple of reasons for splitting things up. 

One is because - now that we're offering awards across podcast, short film and web series categories - we have a lot of awards to present. We want to give our winners their moment in the spotlight but with 50+ award categories, plus a few non-juried ones too, we know that's not possible in one go. 

Something that nobody ever said about award ceremonies is 'I wish that had been longer'. 

Also we know that, even online, it's sometimes hard to attend events that run in unfriendly time zones. We're doing our bit to help make it easier for some of our contenders by running our two international ceremonies at times that are less friendly for us in NZ - but hopefully better for plenty of our nominees.

The ceremonies for our international award categories are on Sunday 12 November (NZ time, UTC+13 hours) at

8am: Podcast and Short Films

10am: Web Series 

Like our Creator Convos, they run on facebook. You can check them out on facebook as they happen or later. If you follow @NZWebFest on facebook, you'll get one of those little notification thingies when we start a session.

Our NZ ceremonies runs that afternoon, and attendance at those is by invitation. 

1.00pm: Short Films

3.00pm: Web Series

We'll live post winners to instagram from all ceremonies as we go, and publish winners' list to our website at the end of the day.

Normal service will be resumed with our next newsletter - which we'll send out on Tuesday 14 November to celebrate our winners, and return to the normal service of spreading the word about other fests on the circuit and what they're up to - which is plenty right now.

Until then, enjoy the festival and - if you come across stuff while you're watching and listening that your friends, frenemies and whanau would enjoy, tell them register here (it's free!).

Everybody's welcome, so please register individually and don't just share the password info. It's free to enjoy the festival, and it helps us because we're able to report more accurately on numbers of attendees. 

We only report anonymised data and we don't share your contact info, for those concerned about their privacy. 

Enjoy #NZWF23 :)