Senta wrote:I'm surprised and disappointed a contest the size of Otakon's doesn't have its own separate awards ceremony.
We've handed out the AMV trophies and played the winners at the Closing Ceremony on Sunday for the last year or two. I've pushed for having an awards ceremony on Saturday night after the Cosplay is over, but there's never been a lot of enthusiasm among the rest of the staff for making it happen. The big problem (I think) is that since the Cosplay may run long, or it may end early, nobody can predict when an awards ceremony can safely be scheduled on Saturday night.
Ashyukun wrote:Re: the Cat Soup video. I think completely omitting it from anything related to the contest (i.e., overflow tapes) was something that should not have happened. IMO, it should have been put on a tape that was scheduled to only be run late at night with a disclaimer about the content- this is what several other conventions do with questionable material.
That's not a bad (or new) idea; I tried doing something like that in 2003.
However, the audience didn't seem overly impressed by the half-dozen videos in that screening (since most of the AMVs had been held out of the overflow for language and/or tastelessness, or non-anime content), and then the bulk of the feedback I got from the few people whose AMVs got relegated to the 'Omega' tape wasn't that they were grateful to be played -- it was that they felt being segregated out for a latenight showing was an insult, and that they didn't like the timeslot because it was too late, and that they didn't think their AMVs deserved to be disqualified in the first place, and all the usual bitter comments implying administrative bias, smallmindedness, hypocrisy, and sadism. On the whole, making up that extra tape was, in the end, extra work to accomplish something that didn't seem to make very many people very happy.
We've always specified in the contest rules that we do have practical limits as to what we feel we can safely show at the convention, and that if something falls outside our limits it there's the chance that can't be shown.