Awards ♥
We’ve Upped Our Prizes This Year
BlackMagic Design Crowd Favourite Award
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Vote for your favourite series from the Melbourne 2020 selection over the festival weekend and they could win a Blackmagic Pocket Cinema Camera 6K.
Blackmagic Pocket Cinema Camera 6K is a next generation digital film camera that enables filmmakers to access the amazing quality of 6K digital film for all types of work. It comes with a full Super 35 size 6K HDR image sensor, 13 stops of dynamic range, an EF lens mount and dual native ISO up to 25,600 for incredible low light performance. Each Pocket Cinema Camera 6K also includes DaVinci Resolve, the only post production software combining professional 8K editing, color correction, visual effects and audio post production in one tool!
Roar Digital Post-Production Services
The winner of the Best Australian Spotlight award will receive $1,000 worth of post-production services from Melbourne based company Roar Digital.
MichAEL Ajakwe Jr Achievement Award
This award acknowledges those who embody the spirit of Michael Ajakwe Jr., creator of the world’s first web series festival LA WebFest. The recipient of this award is recognised for their exceptional work within, and support of, the digital series community.
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Final Draft Subscriptions
The winner of Best Screenplay, Best Australian and International Spotlight, and all the selected student series will receive a subscription to the screenwriting software Final Draft.
Ruby Tickets To Partner Festivals
The Ruby Tickets are awarded to series that will be picked for direct entry to our partner festivals.
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Digital Pigeon Subscriptions
All of our award winning series’ will receive a subscription to the file transfers service Digital Pigeon.
Grand Jury Award
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Impact Award
This year Melbourne WebFest is introducing an Impact Award. The Impact Award celebrates creators telling important stories of our time. These are unique stories that need to be told and that you might not find anywhere else. This award will also recognise series that celebrate diversity on and off screen and have taken an innovative approach in their storytelling.
The Impact Award winner will receive a $250 cash prize.
A panel of jurors from our programming partner RMIT University will determine the winner of this award.
Meet our jury
Dr Cath Moore
Screenwriter & Author – Metal fish, Falling Snow
Cath Moore is an award winning screenwriter who graduated from AFTRS with an MA in Scriptwriting in 2002. She also holds a PHD in Danish Screenwriting practices and teaches at The University of Melbourne and RMIT. She has written for children’s TV, skit comedy, shorts and documentary. Cath writes for The Age and has worked as a story mentor for FilmVictoria’s Story Lab initiative. Her latest film ‘The Pen Licence’ won a special jury mention at the San Francisco International Film Festival. She was an author in the anthology ‘Growing up African in Australia’ and her first novel is will be released in July 2020.
Dr Shweta Kishore
Filmmaker & Curator
Shweta Kishore is a filmmaker, curator and lecturer in the School of Media and Communication at RMIT. Her research focuses on Asian media and documentary, activist and grassroots media, women’s film making, and practices of independent and alternative modes of cinema production and circulation. Shweta is the author of Indian Documentary Film and Filmmakers: Independence in Practice (2018: Edinburgh University Press). In her current video-based research project, Shweta examines the relationship between the fields of contemporary art, gender and feminist discourse in Vietnam. She has curated the screen-based programmes Moving Reels: A Social Dialogue at the Factory Contemporary Arts Centre in Ho Chi Minh City and Artists Cinema at Kochi Muziris Biennale, India.
Dr Kim Munro
Documentarian & AIDC Programmer
Dr Kim Munro is a lecturer in the School of Media and Communication at RMIT University as well as the 2020 programmer of the Australian International Documentary Conference (AIDC). Kim is a documentary maker and has exhibited and screened works in festivals, galleries and television both in Australia and internationally. Kim has published broadly on interactive and immersive documentary, web series, transmedia and collaborative and participatory practices.
Dr Stayci Taylor
Screenwriter & Industry Fellow
Dr Stayci Taylor is a screenwriter, script editor and story consultant whose credits include ten seasons of an award-winning bilingual serial drama and a co-creation of a prime-time sitcom. Like most screenwriters she has a screenplay in development, following two tranches of competitive early development funding from the New Zealand film commission. She currently works as a researcher, lecturer and co-manager with the Master of Media program at RMIT. She is co-editor of two books about script development, forthcoming in 2020 and 2021. She is published widely in academic journals on the topics of screenwriting, comedy and web series. This is Stayci’s fourth year with Melbourne Webfest, in such roles as Grand Juror, panel moderator, pitch iView judge and mentor.
Dr Ramon Lobato
Author, Netflix Nations & Associate Professor
Dr Ramon Lobato is an Associate Professor with the School of Media and Communication, RMIT University. A screen industries researcher with a special interest in digital distribution, Ramon is the author of books including Netflix Nations (New York University Press, 2019) and Shadow Economies of Cinema (British Film Institute, 2012). He currently leads two Australian Research Council projects investigating the impact of subscription streaming services and smart TVs in Australia. With his colleague Alexa Scarlata, Ramon has been tracking local content levels in Australian streaming services since 2017 to inform public debate and decision-making.