The Truth about AMVs

General discussion of Anime Music Videos
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Pwolf
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Re: The Truth about AMVs

Post by Pwolf » Wed Jul 04, 2012 5:32 am

Also, it's late, please forgive me. I do realize that "standards" and "truths" are different but I think it's still very much dependent on the person viewing it. Perfect example would be the Batman video someone posted in the off topic forum a week or two ago. It was a bad video in my mind but I still enjoyed it.

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qyll
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Re: The Truth about AMVs

Post by qyll » Wed Jul 04, 2012 9:25 am

We're just treading old waters here. The concept of "good" in the arts has been argued over and composed to death for millennia. Read up on this page if you're interested: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Aesthetics. Denis Dutton's six "universal signatures" may be just the thing you're looking for, Phan. And, of course, not everyone accepts those signatures.

It seems like the only thing we can agree upon is that we will never be able to agree upon anything.

Pwolf raises some interesting questions, though. Why is the org shrinking when AMV contests are becoming ever more popular (look at the recent Anime Expo)? Is it really because of the internal strife?

And what are some examples of progress in AMVs (and how did these trends spawn)? Those are also interesting questions. I'd love to hear some answers to this one.
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Re: The Truth about AMVs

Post by DriftRoot » Wed Jul 04, 2012 10:11 am

Pwolf wrote:
That said, I think Ari's comments on how everyone on the org agrees is completely wrong. We have never agreed on anything. Look at all the drama that comes out of the VCAs and amv contests every year. If anything THAT is what's been driving people away. We argue so much on what is good or bad all the time. New people don't come here because our website sucks or they don't like how direct and honest we are. The org is very much a no-nonsense community. If you don't want to hear an honest opinion, go to Youtube. Is that bad? No. Does that prevent progress? I don't think so. I believe it makes us try different things.
I didn't really want to get involved in this, but I disagree that there's not collective agreement on the .Org, if I'm understanding Ari's point correctly. My impression of all the arguing, drama and lack of agreement that goes on here (where actual AMVs are concerned) is that it's largely a product of one set of folks who collectively have very similar standards for what makes a good AMV and another set of people who don't. The first group is made up of people who easily represent the .Org's general stance on what makes a good AMV. The second group is made up of people who don't...for whatever reason; maybe they associate more strongly with a different AMV community with different styles and values, maybe they don't see anything wrong with using poor quality fansubs for their footage, maybe they just are too new to AMVing to have learned a lot, yet. That's where the drama and arguing seems to originate, NOT from within the ranks, as it were, and certainly not over very basic, fundamental standards the .Org has laid down as the basis for how AMVs on this website are ranked and evaluated.

Today there are a lot more options for people who don't agree or don't find what they're looking for at the .Org, namely they can go elsewhere, and this has left behind a pool of people who are in far more collective agreement about what constitutes a good AMV, who don't see a need to even really talk much about it anymore. It's now mostly just philosophical, personal poking at different subjects and each other. In that respect it's quite a divisive group (we're human, after all, and this IS the Internet), but if you're talking AMV standards and what the .Org community at large defines as a "good" AMV, then I would say there is very, very solid agreement.

Is it a good thing to have a set of clearly defined standards? Yes, that's what happens when people refine and improve their game. When a-m-v.org was the only game in town, no one had a choice - they had to play by its rules - but we also had a much wider variety and higher quantity of videos in the mix here, FAR more viewpoints on what represented a "good" AMV and a heck of a lot of discussion about it. Nowadays, there's not much of any of that going on. There are other places to go, other rules available, and people naturally gravitate towards what suits them best. Consequently, the editors left here are pretty entrenched in the .Org and don't have a lot to discuss AMV-wise; everyone's pretty much on the same page and/or has discussed such matters to death over the years.

So now we get attempts at meta-discussion and stabs at people's personal views and beliefs, but for anyone outside the .Org looking in, I can't believe that's a very attractive, interesting or valuable face we're putting forward. Every thread that gets posted like this and every person who stays silent and lets a smaller and smaller group of people do the talking is letting those threads and those people define the face of the .Org. Want to be more casual about AMVs and offer a more open and welcoming atmosphere for newcomers? Want to celebrate different kinds of "good" AMVs? Then do so, because it's not going to happen without you. WE are the .Org, every single one of us, but the only people in control of the .Org as a community are the people who act and speak in full view of the community.
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Re: The Truth about AMVs

Post by JudgeHolden » Wed Jul 04, 2012 10:14 am

It's all personal taste, pure and simple. Just like movies ... I mean I have a friend who thinks Constantine is the greatest movie ever made.

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Re: The Truth about AMVs

Post by BasharOfTheAges » Wed Jul 04, 2012 10:15 am

Do enough research on human psychology, social psychology, neuro-science, and the underlying biology behind it all (including stuff like genetics), and you begin to appreciate the collective understanding of how we appreciate things on a subconscious level has more roots in what we are than who we are. As a species, we are preconditioned, independent of nurture, to recognize and derive some degree of pleasure from certain underlying qualities of objects or other people. These are "truths" of the human race. We are, quite literally, hard-wired (neurologically speaking) to see beauty in the golden ratio.
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Re: The Truth about AMVs

Post by BasharOfTheAges » Wed Jul 04, 2012 10:18 am

DriftRoot wrote:I didn't really want to get involved in this, but I disagree that there's not collective agreement on the .Org, if I'm understanding Ari's point correctly. My impression of all the arguing, drama and lack of agreement that goes on here (where actual AMVs are concerned) is that it's largely a product of one set of folks who collectively have very similar standards for what makes a good AMV and another set of people who don't. The first group is made up of people who easily represent the .Org's general stance on what makes a good AMV. The second group is made up of people who don't...for whatever reason; maybe they associate more strongly with a different AMV community with different styles and values, maybe they don't see anything wrong with using poor quality fansubs for their footage, maybe they just are too new to AMVing to have learned a lot, yet. That's where the drama and arguing seems to originate, NOT from within the ranks, as it were, and certainly not over very basic, fundamental standards the .Org has laid down as the basis for how AMVs on this website are ranked and evaluated.

Today there are a lot more options for people who don't agree or don't find what they're looking for at the .Org, namely they can go elsewhere, and this has left behind a pool of people who are in far more collective agreement about what constitutes a good AMV, who don't see a need to even really talk much about it anymore. It's now mostly just philosophical, personal poking at different subjects and each other. In that respect it's quite a divisive group (we're human, after all, and this IS the Internet), but if you're talking AMV standards and what the .Org community at large defines as a "good" AMV, then I would say there is very, very solid agreement.

Is it a good thing to have a set of clearly defined standards? Yes, that's what happens when people refine and improve their game. When a-m-v.org was the only game in town, no one had a choice - they had to play by its rules - but we also had a much wider variety and higher quantity of videos in the mix here, FAR more viewpoints on what represented a "good" AMV and a heck of a lot of discussion about it. Nowadays, there's not much of any of that going on. There are other places to go, other rules available, and people naturally gravitate towards what suits them best. Consequently, the editors left here are pretty entrenched in the .Org and don't have a lot to discuss AMV-wise; everyone's pretty much on the same page and/or has discussed such matters to death over the years.

So now we get attempts at meta-discussion and stabs at people's personal views and beliefs, but for anyone outside the .Org looking in, I can't believe that's a very attractive, interesting or valuable face we're putting forward. Every thread that gets posted like this and every person who stays silent and lets a smaller and smaller group of people do the talking is letting those threads and those people define the face of the .Org. Want to be more casual about AMVs and offer a more open and welcoming atmosphere for newcomers? Want to celebrate different kinds of "good" AMVs? Then do so, because it's not going to happen without you. WE are the .Org, every single one of us, but the only people in control of the .Org as a community are the people who act and speak in full view of the community.
I'm going to say no to this emphatically. There's nothing wrong with having academic discussion. I concede, however, that only a small subset of us are actually having academic discussions, while another portion chimes in with gut reactions, and yet another with conversations completely orthogonal to the topic at hand.
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Re: The Truth about AMVs

Post by gotegenks » Wed Jul 04, 2012 10:31 am

i feel like a lot of people are missing the point here. He's not trying to say "can every single human being agree that a good concept makes a good amv?" He's really saying "what about what we like in a video makes us like it? What about what we like in a video is similar to what people with opposing viewpoints like?"

youtubers may like twitches and oversync, the org may like good concepts and such, but what about those two preferences is similar? and the answer he's going for isn't "well they both include good visuals" or anything physical like that, the answer is more subconscious than that, and i believe he hit the nail on the head with "surprise."

and i can see people taking that like "everyone likes an amv with a twist right?" but that's not at all what he was saying, and he described it in full detail in one of his responses.

i really have yet to see anything that really disputes that claim in here.
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Re: The Truth about AMVs

Post by gotegenks » Wed Jul 04, 2012 10:31 am

JudgeHolden wrote:It's all personal taste, pure and simple. Just like movies ... I mean I have a friend who thinks Constantine is the greatest movie ever made.
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Re: The Truth about AMVs

Post by lloyd9988 » Wed Jul 04, 2012 11:24 am

Read Ari's post about religious posting. . . Reads the title: "The Truth About AMVs". . . Laughs his ass off :rofl:

ALL HAIL THE ALL MIGHTY MUSIC VIDEO!!!

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Re: The Truth about AMVs

Post by Emong » Wed Jul 04, 2012 11:35 am

qyll wrote:Read up on this page if you're interested: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Aesthetics.
To extend the list a little bit:

http://www.iep.utm.edu/aestheti/
http://plato.stanford.edu/entries/aesthetic-judgment/



As for the question about collective agreement on the org - Intuitively speaking, I do think there's a lot more genuine disagreeing going on here than on YouTube for example. Just the pure form of the site (for example this forum, which encourages discussion about amvs, sharing opinions, announcing your own works and receiving criticism and so on) encourages disagreement much more than the YouTube comment wall. Of course general standards will be formed and there'll be inner circles (somewhat like a rule of social networks of any kind) but frankly I think the reason the org's popularity is declining is not mainly related to this. The real reason is probably more boring, namely that we're losing revenue to more popular (and user-friendlier) video sharing sites like YouTube.



And about the actual topic of this thread - I recently learned a nice philosophical definition for the universal: it emerges from the particular's non-coincidence with itself, or, rather, it is nothing but this non-coincidence of the particular with itself. In the case of aesthetic standards, the universal shows itself not in the definitions that are supposed to delineate universal standards for what is "good" or "beautiful" but in the excess that is produced by and excluded from these definitions. Sounds rather abstract but there's really nothing deep about this if you apply it to concrete stuff like amvs. It only says that the moment you try to establish a particular criterion you believe to be true you are also certain to find an example which undermines your particular criterion, or at least find people who reject this criterion. For example, if you try to say that a good amv is defined by the element of surprise, the excess that is excluded from this is of course an amv which is good but not surprising (or even good precisely because it is not surprising). To pick an example from my own recent favorites: Enchanted. To me there's absolutely nothing surprising or original about this amv but I nonetheless think it's good, perhaps even partly because it fully and shamelessly assumes the rules of its genre.

That is not to say criticism is stupid because there are no universal rules. We should totally still do it. I'm rather saying that we are caught in this pursuit that is always doomed to fail in one way or another. And it feels good man :up:

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